THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE 



THE 

SOUL OF A PEOPLE 



BY 



H. FIELDING HALL 
^1 



To see things in their beauty is to see them in their truth ' 

Matthew Arnold 



ILontion 

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 

NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1903 

A II rights reserved 



3 > J 3 ■' 



3 3*3 



> ' > 






First Edition {Demy avo), 1898. 

Second Edition, 1898. 

Third Edition, 1899. 

Fourth Edition {Ex. Cr. Zvo), 1902. Reprinted 1903/ 



} CrV,. 



(i 



/ O ^' 



PREFACE 

In most of the quotations from Burmese books 
containing the life of the Buddha I am indebted, 
if not for the exact words, yet for the sense, to 
Bishop Bigandet's translation. 

I do not think I am indebted to anyone else. I 
have, indeed, purposely avoided quoting from any 
other book and using material collected by anyone 
else. 

The story of Ma Pa Da has appeared often 
before, but my version is taken entirely from the 
Burmese song. ' It is, as I have said, known to 
nearly every Burman. 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. 

1. LIVING BELIEFS 

2. HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 1 / 

3. HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT II '/ 

4. THE WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 

5. WAR 1 

6. WAR II 

7. GOVERNMENT 

8. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 

9. HAPPINESS 

10. THE MONKHOOD 1 . 

11. THE MONKHOOD II . 

I 2, PRAYER 

13. FESTIVALS 

14. WOMEN 1 

15. WOMEN II . . 

16. WOMEN III . 

vii 



r 



PAGE 

I 

16 

42 

51 
70 

79 

93 

106 

116 

139 
144 

169 
187 

205 



viii THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE 



CHAP. 

17. DIVORCE 

t8. manners 

19. 'NOBLESSE oblige' . 

20. ALL LIFE IS ONE 

2 1. DEATH, THE DELIVERER 
2 2. THE potter's WHEEL 
23. THE FOREST OF TIME 





PAGE 


. 


209 




222 
229 


/■ 


248 


/ . 


272 


• 


290 


. 


309 



THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE 



CHAPTER I 

LIVING BELIEFS 

' The observance of the law alone entitles to the right of belonging 
to my religion.' — Saying of the Buddha. 

For the first few years of my stay in Burma my 
life was so full of excitement that I had little care 
or time for any thought but of to-day. There was, 
first of all, my few months in Upper Burma in the 
King's time before the war, months which were full 
of danger and the exhilaration of danger, when all 
the surroundings were too new and too curious to 
leave leisure for examination beneath the surface. 
Then came the flight from Upper Burma at the 
time of the war, and then the war itself And this 
war lasted four years. Not four years of fighting 
in Burma proper, for most of the Irrawaddy valley 
was peaceful enough by the end of 1889; but as 
the central parts quieted down, I was sent to the 
frontier, first on the North and then on the East by 
IE B 



2 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

the Chin Mountains ; so that it was not until 1890 
that a transfer to a more settled part gave me quiet 
and Opportunity for consideration of all I had seen 
and known. For it was in those years that I gained 
most of whatever little knowledge I have of the 
Burmese people. 

Months, very many months, I passed with no 
one to speak to, with no other companions but 
Burmese. I have been with them in joy and in 
sorrow, I have fought with them and against them, 
and sat round the camp-fire after the day's work 
and talked of it all. I have had many friends 
amongst them, friends I shall always honour ; and 
I have seen them killed sometimes in our fights, 
or dead of fever in the marshes of the frontier. I 
have known them, from the labourer to the Prime 
Minister, from the little novice just accepted into 
the faith to the head of all the Burmese religion. 
And I have known their wives and daughters, and 
have watched many a flirtation in the warm scented 
evenings ; and have seen girls become wives and 
wives mothers while I have lived amongst them. 
So that although when the country settled down, 
and we built houses for ourselves and returned more 
to English modes of living, and I felt that I was 
drifting away from them into the distance and 
necessary ignorance of our official lives, yet I had 
in my memory much of what I had seen, much of 
what I had done, that I shall never forget. I felt 
that I had been — even if it were only for a time — 
behind the veil, where it is so hard to come. 

In looking over these memories it seemed to me 
that there were many things I did not understand, 



I LIVING BELIEFS 3 

acts of theirs and customs, which I had seen and 
noted, but of which I did not know the reason. 
We all know how hard it is to see into the heart 
even of our own people, those of our flesh and 
blood who are with us always, and whose ways are 
our ways, and whose thoughts are akin to ours. 
And if this be so with them, it is ten thousand 
times harder with those whose ways are not our 
ways, and from whose thoughts we must be far 
apart. It is true that there are no dark places in 
the lives of the Burmese as there are in the lives of 
other Orientals. All is open to the light of day 
in their homes and in their religion, and their 
women are the freest in the world. Yet the 
barriers of a strange tongue and a strange religion, 
and of ways caused by another climate than ours, 
is so great that, even to those of us who have every 
wish and every opportunity to understand, it seems 
sometimes as if we should never know their hearts. 
It seems as if we should never learn more of them 
than just the outside — that curiously varied outside 
which is so deceptive, and which is so apt to prevent 
our understanding that they are men just as we are 
and not strange creations from some far-away planet. 
So when I settled down and sought to know 
more of the meaning of what I had seen, I thought 
that first of all I must learn somewhat of their 
religion, of that mainspring of many actions, which 
seemed sometimes admirable, sometimes the reverse, 
and nearly always foreign to my ideas. It is true 
that I knew they were Buddhists, that I recognised 
the yellow-robed monks as followers of the word of 
Gaudama the Buddha, and that I had a general 



4 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

acquaintance with the theory of their faith as picked 
up from a book or two — notably, Rhys Davids' 
' Buddhism ' and Bishop Bigandet's book — and from 
many inconsequent talks with the monks and others. 
But the knowledge was but superficial, and I was 
painfully aware that it did not explain much that 
I had seen and that I saw every day. 

So I sent for more books, such books as had 
been published in English, and I studied them, and 
hoped thereby to attain the explanations I wanted ; 
and as I studied, I watched as I could the doings 
of the people, that I might see the effects of 
causes and the results of beliefs. I read in these 
sacred books of the mystery of Dharma, of how 
a man has no soul, no consciousness after death ; 
that to the Buddhist * dead men rise up never,' and 
that those who go down to the grave are known 
no more. I read that all that survives is the effect 
of a man's actions, the evil effect, for good is merely 
negative, and that this is what causes pain and 
trouble to the next life. Everything changes, say 
the sacred books, nothing lasts even for a moment. 
* It will be, and it has been,' is the life of man. 
The life that lives to-morrow in the next incarna- 
tion is no more the life that died in the last than 
the flame we light in the lamp to-day is the same 
that went out yesternight. It is as if a stone were 
thrown into a pool — that is the life, the splash of 
the stone ; all that remains, when the stone lies 
resting in the mud and weeds below the waters 
of forgetfulness, are the circles ever widening on 
the surface, and the ripples never dying, but only 
spreading farther and farther away. And all this 



I LIVING BELIEFS 5 

seemed to me a mystery such as I could not 
understand. But when I went to the people, I 
found that it was simple enough to them ; for 
I found that they remembered their former lives 
often, that children, young children, could tell who 
they were before they died, and remember details 
of that former existence. As they grew older the 
remembrance grew fainter and fainter, and at length 
almost died away. But in many children it was 
quite fresh, and was believed in beyond possibility 
of a doubt by all the people. So I saw that the 
teachings of their sacred books and the thoughts 
of the people were not at one in this matter. 

Again, I read that there was no God, Nats 
there were, spirits of great power like angels, and 
there was the Buddha (the just man made perfect), 
who had worked out for all men the way to reach 
surcease from evil ; but of God I saw nothing. 
And because the Buddha had reached heaven 
(Nirvana), it would be useless to pray to him. 
For, having entered into his perfect rest, he could 
not be disturbed by the sharp cry of those suffering 
below ; and if he heard, still he could not help ; 
for each man must through pain and sorrow work 
out for himself his own salvation. So all prayer 
is futile. "■' 

And then I remembered I had seen the young 
mother going to the pagoda on the hilltop with 
a little offering of a few roses or an orchid spray, 
and pouring out her soul in passionate supplication 
to Someone — Someone unknown to her sacred 
books — that her firstborn might recover of his 
fever, and be to her once more the measureless 



6 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

delight of her life ; and it would seem to me that 
she must believe in a God and in prayer after all. 

So though I found much in these books that 
was believed by the people, and much that was 
to them the guiding influence of their lives, yet I 
was unable to trust to them altogether, and I was 
in doubt where to seek for the real beliefs of these 
people. If I went to their monks, their holy men, 
the followers of the great teacher, Gaudama, they 
referred me to their books as containing all that 
a Buddhist believed ; and when I pointed out the 
discrepancies, they only shook their heads, and said 
that the people were an ignorant people and con- 
fused their beliefs in that way. 

When I asked what was a Buddhist, I was told 
that, to be a Buddhist, a man must be accepted into 
the religion with certain rites, certain ceremonies, he 
must become for a time a member of the community 
of the monks of the Buddha, and that a Buddhist 
was he who was so accepted, and who thereafter 
held by the teachings of the Buddha. 

But when I searched the life of the Buddha, I 
could not find any such ceremonies necessary at all. 
So that it seemed that the religion of the Buddha 
was one religion, and the religion of the Buddhists 
another ; but when I said so to the monks, they 
were horror-struck, and said that it was because I 
did not understand. 

In my perplexity I fell back, as we all must, to 
my own thoughts and those of my own people ; and 
I tried to imagine how a Burman would act if he 
came to England to search into the religion of the 
English and to know the impulses of our lives. 



1 LIVING BELIEFS 7 

I saw how he would be sent to the Bible as the 
source of our religion, how he would be told to study- 
that if he would know what we believed and what 
we did not — what it was that gave colour to our 
lives. I followed him in imagination as he took the 
Bible and studied it, and then went forth and watched 
our acts, and I could see him puzzled, as I was now 
puzzled when I studied his people. 

I thought of him reading the New Testament, 
and how he would come to these verses : 

'27. But I say unto you which hear, Love your 
enemies, do good to them which hate you, 

* 2 8. Bless them that curse you, and pray for 
them which despitefully use you. 

' 29. And unto him that smiteth thee on the one 
cheek, offer also the other ; and him that taketh 
away thy cloke, forbid him not to take thy coat 
also. 

* 30. Give to every man that asketh of thee ; 
and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them 
not again.' 

He would read them again and again, these 
wonderful verses, that he was told the people and 
Church believed, and then he would go forth to 
observe the result of this belief And what would 
he see ? He would see this : A nation proud and 
revengeful, glorying in her victories, always at war, 
a conqueror of other peoples, a mighty hater of her 
enemies. He would find that in the public life of 
the nation with other nations there was no thought 
of this command. He would find, too, in her inner 
life, that the man who took a cloak was not forgiven, 
but was terribly punished — he used to be hanged. 



8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch 

He would find But need I say what he would 

find ? Those who will read this are those very 
people — they know. And the Burman would say 
at length to himself, Can this be the belief of this 
people at all ? Whatever their Book may say, they 
do not think that it is good to humble yourself to 
your enemies — nay, but to strike back hard. It is 
not good to let the wrong-doer go free. They think 
the best way to stop crime is to punish severely. 
Those are their acts ; the Book, they say, is their 
belief. Could they act one thing and believe 
another ? Truly, are these their beliefs ? 

Again, he would read how that riches are an 
offence to righteousness : hardly shall a rich man 
enter into the kingdom of God. He would read 
how the Teacher lived the life of the poorest 
among us, and taught always that riches were to 
be avoided. 

He would go forth and observe a people daily 
fighting and struggling to add field to field, coin to 
coin, till death comes and ends the fight. He would 
see everywhere wealth held in great estimation ; he 
would see the very children urged to do well, to 
make money, to struggle, to rise in the world. He 
would see the lives of men who have become rich 
held up as examples to be followed. He would 
see the ministers who taught the Book with fair 
incomes ranking themselves, not with the poor, but 
with the middle classes; he would see the dignitaries 
of the Church — the men who lead the way to heaven 
— among the wealthy of the land. And he would 
wonder. Is it true, he would say to himself, that 
these people believe that riches are an evil thing? 



I LIVING BELIEFS 9 

Whence, then, come their acts ? for their acts seem 
to show that they hold riches to be a good thing. 
What is to be accepted as their belief: the Book 
they say they believe, which condemns riches, or 
their acts, by which they show that they hold that 
wealth is a good thing — ay, and if used accord- 
ing to their ideas of right, a very good thing 
indeed ? 

So, it seemed to me, would a Burman be puzzled 
if he came to us to find out our belief; and as 
the Burman's difficulty in England was, mutatis 
mutandis^ mine in Burma, I set to work to think 
the matter out. How were the beliefs of a people 
to be known, and why should there be such diffi- 
culties in the way ? If I could understand how it 
was with us, it might help me to know how it was 
with them. 

I have thought that the difficulty arises from the 
fact that there are two ways of seeing a religion 
— from within and from without — and that these 
are as different as can possibly be. It is because 
we forget there are the two standpoints that we fall 
into error. 

In every religion, to the believers in it, the crown 
and glory of their creed is that it is a revelation of 
truth, a lifting of the veil, behind which every man 
born into this mystery desires to look. 

They are sure, these believers, that they have the 
truth, that they alone have the truth, and that it 
has come direct from where alone truth can live. 
They believe that in their religion alone lies safety 
for man from the troubles of this world and from 
the terrors and threats of the next, and that those 



lo THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

alone who follow its teaching will reach happiness 
hereafter, if not here. They believe, too, that this 
truth only requires to be known to be understood 
and accepted of all men ; that as the sun requires 
no witness of its own warmth, so the truth requires 
no evidence of its truth. 

It is to them so eternally true, so matchless in 
beauty, so convincing in itself, that adherents of all 
other creeds have but to hear it pronounced and 
they must believe. To them the question. How 
do you know that your faith is true? is as vain and 
foolish as the cry of the wind in an empty house. 
And if they be asked wherein lies their religion, 
they will produce their sacred books, and declare 
that in them is contained the whole matter. Here 
is the very word of truth, herein is told the meaning 
of all things, herein alone lies righteousness. This, 
they say, is their faith : that they believe in every 
line of it, this truth from everlasting to everlasting, 
and that its precepts, and none other, can be held 
by him who seeks to be a sincere believer. And 
to these believers the manifestation of their faith 
is that its believers attain salvation hereafter. But 
as that is in the next world, if the unbeliever ask 
what is the manifestation in this, the believers will 
answer him that the true mark and sign whereby a 
man may be known to hold the truth is the observ- 
ance of certain forms, the performance of certain 
ceremonies, more or less mystical, more or less 
symbolical, of some esoteric meaning. That a man 
should be baptized, should wear certain marks on 
his forehead, should be accepted with certain rites, is 
generally the outward and visible sign of a believer. 



I LIVING BELIEFS ii 

and the badge whereby others of the same faith have 
known their fellows. 

It has never been possible for any religion to 
make the acts and deeds of its followers the test of 
their belief And for these reasons : that it is a 
test no one could apply, and that if anyone were to 
attempt to apply it, there would soon be no Church 
at all. For to no one is it given to be able to 
observe in their entirety all the precepts of their 
prophet, whoever that prophet may be. All must 
fail, some more and some less, but generally more, 
and thus all would fall from the faith at some time 
or another, and there would be no Church left. And 
so another test has been made necessary. If from 
his weakness a man cannot keep these precepts, 
yet he can declare his belief in and his desire to 
keep them, and here is a test that can be applied. 
Certain rites have been instituted, and it has been 
laid down that those who by their submission to 
these rites show their belief in the truth and their 
desire to follow that truth as far as in them lies, 
shall be called the followers of the faith. And so 
in time it has come about that these ceremonial 
rites have been held to be the true and only sign of 
the believer, and the fact that they were but to be 
the earnest of the beginning and living of a new life 
has become less and less remembered, till it has 
faded into nothingness. And so, instead of the life 
being the main thing, and being absolutely necessary 
to give value and emphasis to the belief, it has come 
to pass that it is the belief, and the acceptance of 
the belief, that has been held to hallow the life and 
excuse and palliate its errors. 



12 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Thus of every religion is this true, that its essence 
IS a belief that certain doctrines are revelations of 
eternal truth, and that the fruit of this truth is the 
observance of certain forms. Morality and works 
may or may not follow, but they are immaterial 
compared with the other. This, put shortly, is the 
view of every believer. 

But to him who does not believe in a faith, who 
views it from without, from the standpoint of another 
faith, the whole view is changed, the whole per- 
spective altered. Those landmarks which to one 
within the circle seem to stand out and overtop 
the world are to the eyes of him without dwarfed 
often into insignificance, and other points rise into 
importance. 

For the outsider judges a religion as he judges 
everything else in this world. He cannot begin by 
accepting it as the only revelation of truth ; he 
cannot proceed from the unknown to the known, 
but the reverse. First of all, he tries to learn what 
the beliefs of the people really are, and then he 
judges from their lives what value this religion has 
to them. He looks to acts as proofs of beliefs, to 
lives as the ultimate effects of thoughts. And he 
finds out very quickly that the sacred books of a 
people can never be taken as showing more than 
approximately their real beliefs. Always through 
the embroidery of the new creed he will find the 
foundation of an older faith, of older faiths, perhaps, 
and below these, again, other beliefs that seem to be 
part of no system, but to be the outcome of the great 
fear that is in the world. 

The more he searches, the more he will be sure 



I LIVING BELIEFS 13 

that there is only one guide to a man's faith, to his 
soul, and that is not any book or system he may 
profess to believe, but the real system that he follows 
— that is to say, that a man's beliefs can be known 
even to himself from his acts only. For it is futile 
to say that a man believes in one thing and does 
another. That is not a belief at all. A man may 
cheat himself, and say it is, but in his heart he 
knows that it is not. A belief is not a proposition 
to be assented to, and then put away and forgotten. 
It is always in our minds, and for ever in our 
thoughts. It guides our every action, it colours 
our whole life. It is not for a day, but for ever. 
When we have learnt that fire burns, we do not put 
the belief away in a pigeon-hole of our minds, there 
to rust for ever unused, nor do we go straightway 
and put our hands in the flames. We remember it 
always ; we keep it as a guiding principle of our 
daily lives. 

A belief is a strand in the cord of our lives, that 
runs through every fathom of it, from the time that 
it is first twisted among the others till the time when 
that life shall end. And as it is thus impossible for 
the onlooker to accept from adherents of a creed a 
definition of what they really believe, so it is impos- 
sible for him to acknowledge the forms and ceremonies 
of which they speak as the real manifestations of 
their creed. 

It seems to the onlooker indifferent that men 
should be dipped in water or not, that they should 
have their heads shaved or wear long hair. Any 
belief that is worth considering at all must have 
results more important to its believers, more valuable 



14 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

to mankind, than such signs as these. It is true that 
of the great sign of all, that the followers of a creed 
attain heaven hereafter, he cannot judge. He can 
only tell of what he sees. This may or may not be 
true ; but surely, if it be true, there must be some 
sign of it here on earth beyond forms. A religion 
that fits a soul for the hereafter will surely begin by 
fitting it for the present, he will think. And it will 
show that it does so otherwise than by ceremonies. 

For forms and ceremonies that have no fruit in 
action are not marks of a living truth, but of a dead 
dogma. There is but little thought of forms to him 
whose heart is full of the teaching of his Master, 
who has His words within his heart, and whose soul 
is full of His love. It is when beliefs die, and love 
has faded into indifference, that forms are necessary, 
for to the living no monument is needed, but to the 
dead. Forms and ceremonies are but the tombs of 
dead truths, put up to their memory to recall to 
those who have never known them that they lived 
and died long ago. 

And because men do not seek for signs of the 
living among the graveyards of the dead, so it is not 
among the ceremonies of religions that we shall find 
the manifestations of living beliefs. 

It is from the standpoint of this outsider that I 
have looked at and tried to understand the soul of 
the Burmese people. When I have read or heard 
of a teaching of Buddhism, I have always taken it to 
the test of the daily life of the people to see whether 
it was a living belief or no. I have accepted just so 
much as I could find the people have accepted, such 
as they have taken into their hearts to be with them 



I LIVING BELIEFS 15 

for ever. A teaching that has been but a teaching 
or theory, a vain breath of mental assent, has seemed 
to me of no value at all. The guiding principles of 
their lives, whether in accordance with the teaching 
of Buddhism or not, these only have seemed to me 
worthy of inquiry or understanding. What I have 
desired to know is not their minds, but their souls. 
And as this test of mine has obliged me to omit 
much that will be found among the dogmas of 
Buddhism, so it has led me to accept many things 
that have no place there at all. For I have thought 
that what stirs the heart of man is his religion, 
whether he calls it religion or not. That which 
makes the heart beat and the breath come quicker, 
love and hate, and joy and sorrow — that has been to 
me as worthy of record as his thoughts of a future 
life. The thoughts that come into the mind of the 
ploughman while he leads his teams afield in the 
golden glory of the dawn ; the dreams that swell and 
move in the heart of the woman when she knows the 
great mystery of a new life ; whither the dying man's 
hopes and fears are led — these have seemed to me 
the religion of the people as well as doctrines of the 
unknown. For are not these, too, of the very soul 
of the people ? 



CHAPTER II 

HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 1 

* He who pointed out the way to those that had lost it.' 

Life of the Btiddha. 

The life-story of Prince Theiddatha, who saw the 
light and became the Buddha twenty-five centuries 
ago, has been told in English many times. It has 
been told in translations from the Pali, from Burmese, 
and from Chinese, and now everyone has read it. 
The writers, too, of these books have been men of 
great attainments, of untiring industry in searching- 
out all that can be known of this life, of gifts such 
as I cannot aspire to. So that there is now nothing 
new to learn of those long past days, nothing fresh 
for me to tell, no discovery that can be made. And 
yet in thinking out what I have to say about the 
religion of the Burmese, I have found that I must 
tell again some of the life of the Buddha, I must 
rewrite this ten -times -told tale, of which I know 
nothing new. And the reason is this : that although 
I know nothing that previous writers have not known, 
although I cannot bring to the task anything like 
their knowledge, yet I have something to say that 

i6 



II HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 17 

they have not said. For they have written of him 
as they have learned from books, whereas I want to 
write of him as I have learned from men. Their 
knowledge has been taken from the records of the 
dead past, whereas mine is from the actualities of the 
living present. 

I do not mean that the Buddha of the sacred 
books and the Buddha of the Burman's belief are 
different persons. They are the same. But as I 
found it with their faith, so I find it with the life 
of their teacher. The Burmese regard the life of 
the Buddha from quite a different standpoint to 
that of an outsider, and so it has to them quite a 
different value, quite a different meaning, to that 
which it has to the student of history. For to 
the writer who studies the life of the Buddha with 
a view merely to learn what that life was, and to 
criticise it, everything is very different to what it 
is to the Buddhist who studies that life because he 
loves it and admires it, and because he desires to 
follow it. To the former the whole detail of every 
portion of the life of the Buddha, every word of his 
teaching, every act of his ministry, is sought out 
and compared and considered. Legend is compared 
with legend, and tradition with tradition, that out of 
many authorities some clue to the actual fact may 
be found. But to the Buddhist the important parts 
in the great teacher's life are those acts, those 
words, that appeal directly to him, that stand out 
bravely, lit with the light of his own experiences 
and feelings, that assist him in living his own life. 
His Buddha is the Buddha he understands, and 
who understood and sympathized with such as him. 

C 



i8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Other things may be true, but they are matters of 
indifference. 

To hear of the Buddha from Hving lips in this 
country, which is full of his influence, where the 
spire of his monastery marks every village, and 
where every man has at one time or another been 
his monk, is quite a different thing to reading of 
him in far countries, under other skies and swayed 
by other thoughts. To sit in the monastery garden 
in the dusk, in just such a tropic dusk as he taught 
in so many }'*ears ago, and hear the yellow-robed 
monk tell of that life, and repeat his teaching of 
love, and charity, and compassion — eternal love, 
perfect charity, endless compassion — until the stars 
come out in the purple sky, and the silver-voiced 
gongs ring for evening prayers, is a thing never 
to be forgotten. As you watch the starlight die 
and the far-off hills fade into the night, as the 
sounds about you become still, and the calm silence 
of the summer night falls over the whole earth, 
you know and understand the teacher of the Great 
Peace as no words can tell you. A sympathy 
comes to you from the circle of believers, and you 
believe, too. An influence and an understanding 
breathes from the nature about you — the same 
nature that the teacher saw — from the whispering 
fig-trees and the scented champaks, and the dimly 
seen statues in the shadows of the shrines, that you 
can never gain elsewhere. And as they tell you the 
story of that great life, they bring it home to you 
with reflection and comment, with application to 
your everyday existence, till you forget that he of 
whom they speak lived so long ago, so very long 



11 HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 19 

ago, and your heart is filled with sorrow when you 
remember that he is dead, that he is entered into 
his peace. 

I do not hope that I can convey much of this in 
my writing. I always feel the hopelessness of trying 
to put on paper the great thoughts, the intense 
feeling, of which Buddhism is so full. But still I 
can, perhaps, give something of this life as I have 
heard it, make it a little more living than it has been 
to us, catch some little of that spirit of sympathy 
that it holds for all the world. 

Around the life of the Buddha has gathered much 
myth, like dust upon an ancient statue, like shadows 
upon the mountains far away, blurring detail here 
and there, and hiding the beauty. There are all 
sorts of stories of the great portents that foretold 
his coming : how the sun and the stars knew, and 
how the wise men prophesied. Marvels attended 
his birth, and miracles followed him in life and in 
death. And the appearance of the miraculous has 
even been heightened by the style of the chroniclers 
in telling us of his mental conflicts : by the personi- 
fication of evil in the spirit man, and of desire in his 
three beautiful daughters. 

All the teacher's thoughts, all his struggles, are 
materialized into forms, that they may be more 
readily brought home to the reader, that they may 
be more clearly realized by a primitive people as 
actual conflicts. 

Therefore at first sight it seems that of all creeds 
none is so full of miracle, so teeming with the 
supernatural, as Buddhism, which is, indeed, the very 
reverse of the truth. For to the supernatural 



20 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Buddhism owes nothing at all. It is in its very- 
essence opposed to all that goes beyond what we 
can see of earthly laws, and miracle is never used 
as evidence of the truth of any dogma or of any 
doctrine. 

If every supernatural occurrence were wiped clean 
out of the chronicles of the faith, Buddhism would, 
even to the least understanding of its followers, 
remain exactly where it is. Not in one jot or tittle 
would it suffer in the authority of its teaching. 
The great figure of the teacher would even gain 
were all the tinsel of the miraculous swept from him, 
so that he stood forth to the world as he lived — 
would gain not only to our eyes, but even to theirs 
who believe in him. For the Buddha was no 
prophet. He was no messenger from any power 
above this world, revealing laws of that power. No 
one came to whisper into his ear the secrets of 
eternity, and to show him where truth lived. In no 
trance, in no vision, did he enter into the presence 
of the Unknown, and return from thence full of the 
wisdom of another world ; neither did he teach the 
worship of any god, of any power. He breathed no 
threatenings of revenge for disobedience, of forgive- 
ness for the penitent. He held out no everlasting 
hell to those who refused to follow him, no easily 
gained heaven to his believers. 

He went out to seek wisdom, as many a one has 
done, looking for the laws of God with clear eyes to 
see, with a pure heart to understand, and after many 
troubles, after many mistakes, after much suffering, 
he came at last to the truth. 

Even as Newton sought for the laws of God in 



II HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 21 

the movement of the stars, in the falling of a stone, 
in the stir of the great waters, so this Newton of 
the spiritual world sought for the secrets of life and 
death, looking deep into the heart of man, marking 
its toil, its suffering, its little joys with a soul attuned 
to catch every quiver of the life of the world. And 
as to Newton truth did not come spontaneously, 
did not reveal itself to him at his first call, but had 
to be sought with toil and weariness, till at last he 
reached it where it hid in the heart of all things, so 
it was with the prince. He was not born with the 
knowledge in him, but had to seek it as every other 
man has done. He made mistakes as other men 
do. He wasted time and labour following wrong 
roads, demonstrating to himself the foolishness of 
many thoughts. But, never discouraged, he sought 
on till he found, and what he found he gave as a 
heritage to all men for ever, that the way might be 
easier for them than it had been for him. 

Nothing is more clear than this : that to the 
Buddhist his teacher was but a man like himself, 
erring and weak, who made himself perfect, and 
that even as his teacher has done, so, too, may he 
if he do but observe the everlasting laws of life 
which the Buddha has shown to the world. These 
laws are as immutable as Newton's laws, and come, 
like his, from beyond our ken. 

And this, too, is another point wherein the parallel 
with Newton will help us : that just as when New- 
ton discovered gravitation he was obliged to stop, 
for his knowledge of that did not lead him at once 
to the knowledge of the infinite, so when he had 
attained the laws of righteousness, Gaudama the 



22 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Buddha also stopped, because here his standing- 
ground failed. It is not true, that which has been 
imputed to the Buddha by those who have never 
tried to understand him — that he denied some power 
greater than ourselves ; that because he never tried 
to define the indefinite, to confine the infinite within 
the corners of a phrase, therefore his creed was 
materialistic. We do not say of Newton that he 
was an atheist because when he taught us of gravity 
he did not go further and define to us in equations 
Him who made gravity ; and as we understand 
more of the Buddha, as we search into life and con- 
sider his teaching, as we try to think as he thought, 
and to see as he saw, we understand that he stopped 
as Newton stopped, because he had come to the end 
of all that he could see, not because he declared that 
he knew all things, and that beyond his knowledge 
there was nothing. 

No teacher more full of reverence, more humble 
than Gaudama the Buddha ever lived to be an 
example to us through all time. He tells us of 
what he knows ; of what he knows not he is silent. 
Of the laws that he can see, the great sequences of 
life and death, of evil and sorrow, of goodness and 
happiness, he tells in burning words. Of the 
beginning and the end of the world, of the intentions 
and the ways of the great Unknown, he tells us 
nothing at all. He is no prophet, as we understand 
the word, but a man ; and all that is divine in him 
beyond what there is in us is that he hated the 
darkness and sought the light, sought and was not 
dismayed, and at last he found. 

And yet nothing could be further from the truth 



n HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 23 

than to call the Buddha a philosopher and Buddhism 
a philosophy. Whatever he was, he was no philo- 
sopher. Although he knew not any god, although 
he rested his claims to be heard upon the fact that 
his teachings were clear and understandable, that 
you were not required to believe, but only to open 
your eyes and see, and 'his delight was in the con- 
templation of unclouded truth,' yet he was far from 
a philosopher. His was not an appeal to our reason, 
to our power of putting two and two together and 
making five of them ; his teachings were no curious 
designs woven with words, the counters of his 
thought. He appealed to the heart, not to the 
brain ; to our feelings, not to our power of arranging 
these feelings. He drew men to him by love and 
reverence, and held them so for ever. Love and 
charity and compassion, endless compassion, are the 
foundations of his teachings ; and his followers 
believe in him because they have seen in him the 
just man made perfect, and because he has shown to 
them the way in which all men may become even 
as he is. 

He was a prince in a little kingdom in the North- 
east of India, the son of King Thudoodana and his 
wife Maya. He was strong, we are told, and hand- 
some, famous in athletic exercises, and his father 
looked forward to the time when he should be grown 
a great man, and a leader of armies. His fathers 
ambition for him was that he should be a great 
conqueror, that he should lead his troops against the 
neighbouring kings and overcome them, and in time 
make for himself a wide-stretching empire. India 
was in those days, as in many later ones, split up 



24 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

into little kingdoms, divided from each other by no 
natural boundary, overlooked by no sovereign power, 
and always at war. And the king, as fathers are, 
was full of dreams that this son of his should subdue 
all India to himself, and be the glory of his dynasty, 
and the founder of a great race. 

Everything seemed to fall in with the desire of 
the king. The prince grew up strong and valiant, 
skilled in action, wise in counsel, so that all his 
people were proud of him. Everything fell in with 
the desire of the king except the prince himself, for 
instead of being anxious to fight, to conquer other 
countries, to be a great leader of armies, his desires 
led him away from all this. Even as a boy he was 
meditative and given to religious musings, and as 
he grew up he became more and more confirmed in 
his wish to know of sacred things, more and more 
an inquirer into the mysteries of life. 

He was taught all the faith of those days, a faith 
so old that we do not know whence it came. He 
was brought up to believe that life is immortal, that 
no life can ever utterly die. He was taught that all 
life is one ; that there is not one life of the beasts 
and one life of men, but that all life was one glorious 
unity, one great essence coming from the Unknown. 
Man is not a thing apart from this world, but of it. 
As man's body is but the body of beasts, refined 
and glorified, so the soul of man is but a higher 
stage of the soul of beasts. Life is a great ladder. 
At the bottom are the lower forms of animals, and 
some way up is man ; but all are climbing upwards 
for ever, and sometimes, alas ! falling back. Exist- 
ence is for each man a great struggle, punctuated 



11 HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 25 

with many deaths ; and each death ends one period 
but to allow another to begin, to give us a new 
chance of working up and gaining heaven. 

He was taught that this ladder is very high, that 
its top is very far away, above us, out of our sight, 
and that perfection and happiness lie up there, and 
that we must strive to reach them. The greatest 
man, even the greatest king, was farther below per- 
fection than an animal was below him. We are 
very near the beasts, but very far from heaven. 
So he was taught to remember that even as a very 
great prince he was but a weak and erring soul, 
and that unless he lived well and did honest deeds 
and was a true man, instead of rising he might fall. 

This teaching appealed to the prince far more^ 
than all the urging of his father and of the courtiers 
that he should strive to become a great conqueror. 
It entered into his very soul, and his continual 
thought was how he was to be a better man, how 
he was to use this life of his so that he should gain 
and not lose, and where he was to find happiness. 

All the pomp and glory of the palace, all its 
luxury and ease, appealed to him very little. Even 
in his early youth he found but little pleasure in it, 
and he listened more to those who spoke of holiness 
than to those who spoke of war. He desired, we 
are told, to become a hermit, to cast off from him 
his state and dignity, and to put on the yellow 
garments of a mendicant, and beg his bread wander- 
ing up and down upon the world, seeking for peace. 

This disposition of the prince grieved his parents 
very much. That their son, who was so full of 
promise, so brave and so strong, so wise and so 



26 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

much beloved by everyone, should become a mendi- 
cant clad in unclean garments, begging his daily 
food from house to house, seemed to them a horrible 
thing. It could never be permitted that a prince 
should disgrace himself in this way. Every effort 
must be taken to eradicate such ideas ; after all, it 
was but the melancholy of youth, and it would pass. 
So stringent orders were given to distract his mind 
in every way from solemn thoughts, to attempt by 
a continued round of pleasure and luxury to attract 
him to more worldly things. And when he was 
eighteen he was married to his cousin Yathodaya, in 
the hope that in marriage and paternity he might 
forget his desire to be a hermit, might feel that love 
was better than wisdom. And if Yathodaya had 
been other than she was — who can tell ? — perhaps 
after all the king might have succeeded ; but it was 
not to be so. For to Yathodaya, too, life was a 
very solemn thing, not to be thrown away in 
laughter and frivolity, but to be used as a great gift 
worthy of all care. To the prince in his trouble 
there came a kindred soul, and though from the 
palace all the teachers of religion, all who would 
influence the prince against the desires of his father, 
were banished, yet Yathodaya more than made up 
to him for all he had lost. For nearly ten years 
they lived together there such a life as princes led 
in those days in the East, not, perhaps, so very 
different from what they lead now. 

And all that time the prince had been gradually 
making up his mind, slowly becoming sure that 
life held something better than he had yet found, 
hardening his determination that he must leave all 



II HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 27 

that he had and go out into the world looking for 
peace. Despite all the efforts of the king his father, 
despite the guards and his young men companions, 
despite the beauty of the dancing-girls, the mysteries 
of life came home to him, and he was afraid. It is 
a beautiful story told in quaint imagery how it was 
that the knowledge of sickness and of death came 
to him, a horror stalking amid the glories of his 
garden. He learnt, and he understood, that he too 
would grow old, would fall sick, would die. And 
beyond death ? There was the fear, and no one 
could allay it. Daily he grew more and more dis- 
contented with his life in the palace, more and more 
averse to the pleasures that were around him. 
Deeper and deeper he saw through the laughing 
surface to the depths that lay beneath. Silently 
all these thoughts ripened in his mind, till at last 
the change came. We are told that the end came 
suddenly, the resolve was taken in a moment. The 
lake fills and fills until at length it overflows, and 
in a night the dam is broken, and the pent-up 
waters are leaping far towards the sea. 

As the prince returned from his last drive in his 
garden with resolve firmly established in his heart, 
there came to him the news that his wife had 
borne to him a son. Wife and child, his cup of 
desire was now full. But his resolve was unshaken. 
* See, here is another tie, alas ! a new and stronger 
tie that I must break,' he said ; but he never 
wavered. 

That night the prince left the palace. Silently 
in the dead of night he left all the luxury about 
him, and went out secretly with only his faithful 



28 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

servant, Maung San, to saddle for him his horse 
and lead him forth. Only before he left he looked 
in cautiously to see Yathodaya, the young wife and 
mother. She was lying asleep, with one hand upon 
the face of her firstborn, and the prince was afraid 
to go further. * To see him,' he said, * I must 
remove the hand of his mother, and she may awake ; 
and if she awake, how shall I depart ? I will go, 
then, without seeing my son. Later on, when all 
these passions are faded from my heart, when I am 
sure of myself, perhaps then I shall be able to see 
him. But now I must go.' 

So he went forth very silently and very sadly, 
and leapt upon his horse — the great white horse 
that would not neigh for fear of waking the sleeping 
guards — and the prince and his faithful noble 
Maung San went out into the night. He was only 
twenty-eight when he fled from all his world, and 
what he sought was this : ' Deliverance for men 
from the misery of life, and the knowledge of the 
truth that will lead them unto the Great Peace.' 

This is the great renunciation. 

I have often talked about this with the monks 
and others, often heard them speak about this great 
renunciation, of this parting of the prince and his 
wife. 

* You see,' said a monk once to me, * he was not 
yet the Buddha, he had not seen the light, only he 
was desirous to look for it. He was just a prince, 
just a man like any other man, and he was very 
fond of his wife. It is very hard to resist a woman 
if she loves you and cries, and if you love her. So 
he was afraid.' 



11 HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 29 

And when I said that Yathodaya was also religious 
and had helped him in his thoughts, and that surely 
she would not have stopped him, the monk shook 
his head. 

* Women are not like that,' he said. 

And a woman said to me once : ' Surely she was 
very much to be pitied because her husband went 
away from her and her baby. Do you think that 
when she talked religion with her husband she ever 
thought that it would cause him to leave her and go 
away for ever ? If she had thought that, she would 
never have done as she did. A woman would never 
help anything to sever her husband from her, not 
even religion. And when after ten years a baby 
had come to her ! Surely she was very much to be 
pitied.' This woman made me understand that the 
highest religion of a woman is the true love of her 
husband, of her children ; and what is it to her if 
she gain the whole world, but lose that which she 
would have ? 

All the story of Yathodaya and her dealings with 
her husband is full of the deepest pathos, full of 
passionate protest against her loss, even in order 
that her husband and all .the world should gain. 
She would have held him, if she could, against the 
world, and deemed that she did well. And so, 
though it is probable that it was a great deal owing 
to Yathodaya's help, to her sympathy, to her support 
in all his difficulties, that Gaudama came to his 
final resolve to leave the world and seek for the 
truth, yet she acted unwittingly of what would be 
the end. 

' She did not know,' said the woman. * She 



30 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.ii 

helped her husband, but she did not know to what. 
And when she was ill, when she was giving birth to 
her baby, then her husband left her. Surely she 
was very much to be pitied.' 

And so Yathodaya, the wife of the Prince 
Gaudama, who became the Buddha, is held in high 
honour, in great esteem, by all Buddhists. By the 
men, because she helped her husband to his resolve 
to seek for the truth, because she had been his great 
stay and help when everyone was against him, 
because if there had been no Yathodaya there had 
been perchance no Buddha. And by the women — 
I need not say why she is honoured by all women. 
If ever there was a story that appealed to woman's 
heart, surely it is this : her love, her abandonment, 
her courage, her submission when they met again in 
after-years, her protest against being sacrificed upon 
the altar of her husband's religion. Truly, it is all 
of the very essence of humanity. Whenever the 
story of the Buddha comes to be written, then will 
be written also the story of the life of Yathodaya 
his wife. And if one is full of wisdom and teaching, 
the other is full of suffering and teaching also. I 
cannot write it here. I have so much to say on 
other matters that there is no room. But some 
day it will be written, I trust, this old message to a 
new world. 



CHAPTER III 

HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT II 

' He who never spake but good and wise words, he who was the 
light of the world, has found too soon the Peace.' — Lament on the 
death of the Buddha. 

The prince rode forth into the night, and as he 
went, even in the first flush of his resolve, tempta- 
tion came to him. As the night closed behind he 
remembered all he was leaving : he remembered his 
father and his mother ; his heart was full of his wife 
and child. 

' Return ! ' said the devil to him. ' What seek 
you here ? Return, and be a good son, a good 
husband, a good father. Remember all that you are 
leaving to pursue vain thoughts. You are a great 
man — you might be a great king, as your father 
wishes — a mighty conqueror of nations. The night 
is very dark, and the v/orld before you is very 
empty.' 

And the prince's heart was full of bitterness at 
the thought of those he loved, of all that he was 
losing. Yet he never wavered. He would not even 
turn to look his last on the great white city lying in 
a silver dream behind him. He set his face upon 



32 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

his way, trampling beneath him every worldly con- 
sideration, despising a power that was but vanity 
and illusion ; he went on into the dark. 

Presently he came to a river, the boundary of his 
father's kingdom, and here he stopped. Then the 
prince turned to Maung San, and told him that he 
must return. Beyond the river lay for the prince 
the life of a holy man, who needed neither servant 
nor horse, and Maung San must return. All his 
prayers were in vain ; his supplications that he 
might be allowed to follow his master as a disciple ; 
his protestations of eternal faith. No, he must 
return ; so Maung San went back with the horse, 
and the prince was alone. 

As he waited there alone by the river, alone in 
the dark waiting for the dawn ere he could cross, 
alone with his own fears and thoughts, doubt came 
to him again. He doubted if he had done right, 
whether he should ever find the light, whether, 
indeed, there was any light to find, and in his 
doubt and distress he asked for a sign. He desired 
that it might be shown to him whether all his efforts 
would be in vain or not, whether he should ever win 
in the struggle that was before him. We are told 
that the sign came to him, and he knew that, what- 
ever happened, in the end all would go well, and he 
would find that which he sought. 

So he crossed the river out of his father's kingdom 
into a strange country, and he put on the garment of 
a recluse, and lived as they did. 

He sought his bread as they did, going from 
house to house for the broken victuals, which he 
collected in a bowl, retiring to a quiet spot to eat. 



Ill HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 33 

The first time he collected this strange meal and 
attempted to eat, his very soul rose against the dis- 
tastefulness of the mess. He who had been a prince, 
and accustomed to the very best of everything, could 
not at first bring himself to eat such fare, and the 
struggle was bitter. But in the end here, too, he 
conquered. ' Was I not aware,' he said, with bitter 
indignation at his weakness, ' that when I became a 
recluse I must eat such food as this ? Now is the 
time to trample upon the appetite of nature.' He 
took up his bowl, and ate with a good appetite, and 
the fight had never to be fought again. 

So in the fashion of those days he became a 
seeker after truth. Men, then, when they desired 
to find holiness, to seek for that which is better than 
the things of this world, had to begin their search 
by an utter repudiation of all that which the world 
holds good. The rich and worldly wore handsome 
garments, they would wear rags ; those of the world 
were careful of their personal appearance, they would 
despise it ; those of the world were cleanly, the 
hermits were filthy ; those of the world were decent, 
and had a care for outward observances, and so 
hermits had no care for either decency or modesty. 
The world was evil, surely, and therefore all that the 
world held good was surely evil too. Wisdom was 
to be sought in the very opposites of the conventions 
of men. 

The prince took on him their garments, and went 
to them to learn from all that which they had learnt. 
He went to all the wisest hermits of the land, to 
those renowned for their wisdom and holiness ; and 
this is what they taught him, this is all the light they 

D 



34 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

gave to him who came to them for light. ' There 
are/ they said, * the soul and the body of man, and 
they are enemies ; therefore, to purify the soul, you 
must destroy and punish the body. All that the 
body holds good is evil to the soul' And so they 
purified their souls by ceremonies and forms, by 
torture and starvation, by nakedness and contempt 
of decency, by nameless abominations. And the 
young prince studied all their teaching, and essayed 
to follow their example, and he found it was all of 
no use. Here he could find no way to happiness, 
no raising of the soul to higher planes, but, rather, 
a degradation towards the beasts. For self-punish- 
ment is just as much a submission to the flesh as 
luxury and self-indulgence. How can you forget 
the body, and turn the soul to better thoughts, if 
you are for ever torturing that body, and thereby 
keeping it in memory ? You can keep your lusts 
just as easily before your eyes by useless punish- 
ment as by indulgence. And how can you turn 
your mind to meditation and thought if your body 
is in suffering? So the prince soon saw that here 
was not the way he wanted. His soul revolted from 
them and their austerities, and he left them. As he 
fathomed the emptiness of his counsellors of the 
palace, so he fathomed the emptiness of the teachers 
of the cave and monastery. If the powerful and 
wealthy were ignorant, wisdom was not to be found 
among the poor and feeble, and he w^as as far from 
it as when he left the palace. And yet he did not 
despair. Truth was somewhere, he was sure ; it 
must be found if only it be looked for with patience 
and sincerity, and he would find it. Surely there 



Ill HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 35 

was a greater wisdom than mere contempt of wealth 
and comfort, surely a greater happiness than could 
be found in self-torture and hysteria. And so, as he 
could find no one to teach him, he went out into the 
forest to look for truth there. In the great forests 
where no one comes, where the deer feed and the 
tiger creeps, he would seek what man could not give 
him. They would know, those great trees that had 
seen a thousand rains, and outlived thirty genera- 
tions of men ; they would know, those streams that 
flashed from the far snow summits ; surely the forest 
and the hills, the dawn and the night, would have 
something to tell him of the secrets of the world. 
Nature can never lie, and here, far away from the 
homes of men, he would learn that knowledge that 
men could not give him. With a body purified 
by abstinence, with a heart attuned by solitude, he 
would listen as the winds talked to the mountains 
in the dawn, and understand the beckoning of the 
stars. And so, as many others did then and after- 
wards, he left mankind and went to Nature for 
help. For six years he lived so in the fastnesses 
of the hills. 

We are told but very little of those six years, 
only that he was often very lonely, often very sad 
with the remembrance of all whom he had left. 
* Think not,' he said many years later to a favourite 
disciple — ' think not that I, though the Buddha, 
have not felt all this even as any other of you. Was 
I not alone when I was seeking for wisdom in the 
wilderness ? And yet what could I have gained by 
wailing and lamentation either for myself or for 
others ? Would it have brought to me any solace 



36 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

from my loneliness ? Would it have been any help 
to those I had left ? ' 

And we are told that his fame as a solitary, as a 
man who communed with Nature, and subdued his 
own lower feelings, was so great that all men knew 
of it. His fame was as a ' bell hung in the canopy 
of the skies,' that all nations heard ; and many 
disciples came to him. But despite all his fame 
among men, he himself knew that he had not yet 
come to the truth. Even the great soul of Nature 
had failed to tell him what he desired. The truth 
was as far off as ever, so he thought, and to those 
that came to him for wisdom he had nothing to 
teach. So, at the end of six years, despairing of 
finding that which he sought, he entered upon a 
great fast, and he pushed it to such an extreme 
that at length he fainted from sheer exhaustion and 
starvation. 

And when he came to himself he recognized that 
he had failed again. No light had shone upon his 
dimmed eyes, no revelation had come to him in his 
senselessness. All was as before, and the truth — 
the truth, where was that ? 

He was no inspired teacher He had no one to 
show him the way he should go ; he was tried with 
failure, with failure after failure. He learnt as other 
men learn, through suffering and mistake. Here 
was his third failure. The rich had failed him, and 
the poor ; even the voices of the hills had not told 
him of what he would know, even the radiant finger 
of dawn had pointed to him no way to happiness. 
Life was just as miserable, as empty, as meaningless, 
as before. 



Ill HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 37 

All that he had done was in vain, and he must 
try again, must seek out some new way, if he were 
ever to find that which he sought. 

He rose from where he lay, and took his bowl in 
his hands and went to the nearest village, and ate 
heartily and drank, and his strength came back to 
him, and the beauty he had lost returned. 

And then came the final blow : his disciples left 
him in scorn. 

' Behold,' they said to each other, ' he has lived 
through six years of mortification and suffering in 
vain. See, now, he goes forth and eats food, and 
assuredly he who does this will never attain wisdom. 
Our master's search is not after wisdom, but worldly 
things ; we must look elsewhere for the guidance 
that we seek.' 

They departed, leaving him to bear his disap- 
pointment alone, and they went into the solitude far 
away, to continue in their own way and pursue their 
search after their own method. He who was to be 
the Buddha had failed, and was alone. 

To the followers of the Buddha, to those of our 
brothers who are trying to follow his teachings and 
emulate his example to attain a like reward, can 
there be any greater help than this : amid the failure 
and despair of our own lives to remember that the 
teacher failed, even as we are doing ? If we find 
the way dark and weary, if our footsteps fail, if we 
wander in wrong paths, did not he do the same ? 
And if we find we have to bear sufferings alone, 
so had he ; if we find no one who can comfort us, 
neither did he ; as we know in our hearts that we 
stand alone, to fight with our own hands, so did he. 



38 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

He is no model of perfection whom it is hopeless 
for us to imitate, but a man like ourselves, who 
failed and fought, and failed and fought again, and 
won. And so, if we fail, we need not despair. Did 
not our teacher fail ? What he has done, we can 
do, for he has told us so. Let us be up again and 
be of good heart, and we, too, shall win in the end, 
even as he did. The reward will come in its own 
good time if we strive and faint not. 

Surely this comes home to all of our hearts — this 
failure of him who found the light. That he should 
have won — ah, well, that is beautiful, yet by its very 
success is far away ; but that he should have failed 
and failed, that is what comes home to us, because 
we too have failed many times. Can you wonder 
that his followers love him ? Can you wonder that 
his teaching has come home to them as never did 
teaching elsewhere ? I do not think it is hard to 
see why : it is simply because he was a man as we 
are. Had he been other than a man, had truth 
been revealed to him from the beginning, had he 
never fought, had he never failed, do you think that 
he would have held the love of men as he does ? I 
fear, had it been so, this people would have lacked 
a soul. 

His disciples left him, and he was alone. He 
went away to a great grove of trees near by — those 
beautiful groves of mango and palm and fig that are 
the delight of the heart in that land of burning, 
flooding sunshine — and there he slept, defeated, 
discredited, and abandoned ; and there the truth 
came to him. 

There is a story of how a young wife, coming to 



Ill HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 39 

give her little offerings to the spirit of the great fig- 
tree, saw him, and took him for the spirit, so 
beautiful was his face as he rose. 

There are spirits in all the great trees, in all the 
rivers, in all the hills — very beautiful, very peaceful, 
loving calm and rest. 

The woman thought he was the spirit come down 
to accept her offering, and she gave it to him — the 
cup of curdled milk — in fear and trembling, and he 
took it. The woman went away again full of hope 
and joy, and the prince remained in the grove. He 
lived there for forty-nine days, we are told, under the 
great fig-tree by the river. And the fig-tree has 
become sacred for ever because he sat there and 
because there he found the truth. We are told of it 
all in wonderful trope and imagery — of his last fight 
over sin, and of his victory. 

There the truth came to him at last out of his own 
heart. He had sought for it in men and in Nature, 
and found it not, and, lo ! it was in his own heart. 

When his eyes were cleared of imaginings, and 
his body purified by temperance, then at last he saw, 
down in his own soul, what he had sought the world 
over for. Every man carries it there. It is never 
dead, but lives with our life, this light that we seek. 
We darken it, and turn our faces from it to follow 
strange lights, to pursue vague glimmers in the dark, 
and there, all the time, is the light in each man's 
own heart. Darkened it may be, crusted over with 
our ignorance and sin, but never dead, never dim, 
always burning brightly for us when we care to 
seek for it. 

The truth for each man is in his own soul. And 



40 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

SO it came at last, and he who saw the light went 
forth and preached it to all the world. He lived 
a long life, a life full of wonderful teaching, of still 
more marvellous example. All the world loved 
him. 

He saw again Yathodaya, she who had been his 
wife ; he saw his son. Now, when passion was 
dead in him, he could do these things. And 
Yathodaya was full of despair, for if all the world 
had gained a teacher, she had lost a husband. So 
it will be for ever. This is the difference between 
men and women. She became a nun, poor soul ! 
and her son — his son — became one of his disciples. 

I do not think it is necessary for me to tell much 
more of his life. Much has been told already by 
Professor Max Miiller and other scholars, who have 
spared no pains to come to the truth of that life. I 
do not wish to say more. So far, I have written to 
emphasize the view which, I think, the Burmese take 
of the Buddha, and how he came to his wisdom, how 
he loved, and how he died. 

He died at a great age, full of years and love. 
The story of his death is most beautiful. There 
is nowhere anything more wonderful than how, at 
the end of that long good life, he entered into the 
Great Peace for which he had prepared his soul. 

' Ananda,' he said to his weeping disciple, * do 
not be too much concerned with what shall remain 
of me when I have entered into the Peace, but be 
rather anxious to practise the works that lead to 
perfection ; put on these inward dispositions that 
will enable you also to reach the everlasting rest' 

And again ; 



Ill HE WHO FOUND THE LIGHT 41 

* When I shall have left life and am no more seen 
by you, do not believe that I am no longer v^ith you. 
You have the lavi^s that I have found, you have my 
teachings still, and in them I shall be ever beside 
you. Do not, therefore, think that I have left you 
alone for ever.' 

And before he died : 

' Remember,' he said, ' that life and death are one. 
Never forget this. For this purpose have I gathered 
you together ; for life and death are one.' 

And so ' the great and glorious teacher/ he vi^ho 
never spoke but good and wise words, he who has 
been the light of the world, entered into the Peace. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 

' Come to Me : I teach a doctrine which leads to deliverance from all 
the miseries of life.' — Saying of the Buddha. 

To understand the teaching of Buddhism, it must 
be remembered that to the Buddhist, as to the 
Brahmin, man's soul is eternal. 

In other faiths and other philosophies this is not 
so. There the soul is immortal ; it cannot die, but 
each man's soul appeared newly on his birth. Its 
beginning is very recent. 

To the Buddhist the beginning as well as the end 
is out of our ken. Where we came from we cannot 
know, but certainly the soul that appears in each 
newborn babe is not a new thing. It has come from 
everlasting, and the present life is merely a scene in 
the endless drama of existence. A man's identity, 
the sum of good and of evil tendencies, which is his 
soul, never dies, but endures for ever. Each body is 
but a case wherein the soul is enshrined for the time. 

And the state of that soul, whether good pre- 
dominate in it or evil, is purely dependent on that 
soul's thoughts and actions in time past. 

42 



IV WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 43 

Men are not born by chance wise or foolish, 
righteous or wicked, strong or feeble. A man's 
condition in life is the absolute result of an eternal 
law that as a man sows so shall he reap ; that as he 
reaps so has he sown. 

Therefore, if you find a man's desires naturally 
given towards evil, it is because he has in his past 
lives educated himself to evil. And if he is righteous 
and charitable, long-suffering and full of sympathy, 
it is because in his past existence he has cultivated 
these virtues ; he has followed goodness, and it has 
become a habit of his soul. 

Thus is every man his own maker. He has no 
one to blame for his imperfections but himself, no 
one to thank for his virtues but himself. Within 
the unchangeable laws of righteousness each man is 
absolutely the creator of himself and of his own 
destiny. It has lain, and it lies, within each man's 
power to determine what manner of man he shall 
be. Nay, it not only lies within his power to do so, 
but a man must actually mould himself There is 
no other way in which he can develop. 

Every man has had an equal chance. If matters 
are somewhat unequal now, there is no one to blame 
but himself. It is within his power to retrieve it, 
not perhaps in this short life, but in the next, 
maybe, or the next. 

Man is not made perfect all of a sudden, but 
takes time to grow, like all valuable things. You 
might as well expect to raise a teak-tree in your 
garden in a night as to make a righteous man in 
a day. And thus not only is a man the sum of 
his passions, his acts and his thoughts, in past time, 



44 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

but he is in his daily life determining his future — 
what sort of man he shall be. Every act, every 
thought, has its effect, not only upon the outer 
world, but upon the inner soul. If you follow 
after evil, it becomes in time a habit of your soul. 
If you follow after good, every good act is a 
beautifying touch to your own soul. 

Man is as he has made himself; man will be 
as he makes himself This is a very simple theory, 
surely. It is not at all difficult to understand the 
Buddhist standpoint in the matter. It is merely 
the theory of evolution applied to the soul, with this 
difference : that in its later stages it has become 
a deliberate and a conscious evolution, and not an 
unconscious one. 

The deduction from this is also simple. It is 
true, says Buddhism, that every man is the architect 
of himself, that he can make himself as he chooses. 
Now, what every man desires is happiness. As a 
man can form himself as he will, it is within his 
power to make himself happy, if he only knows 
how. Let us therefore carefully consider what 
happiness is, that we may attain it ; what misery 
is, that we may avoid it. 

It is a commonplace of many religions, and of 
many philosophies — nay, it is the actual base upon 
which they have been built, that this is an evil world. 

Mahommedanism, indeed, and Judaism thought 
that the world was really a capital place, and that 
it was worth while doing well in order to enjoy 
it. But most other faiths thought very differently. 
Indeed, the very meaning of most religions and 
philosophies has been that they should be refuges 



IV WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 45 

from the wickedness and unhappiness of the world. 
According to them the world has been a very weary- 
world, full of wickedness and of deceit, of war and 
strife, of untruth and of hate, of all sorts of evil. 

The world has been wicked, and man has been 
unhappy in it. 

I do not know that any theory has usually been 
propounded to explain why this is so. It has been 
accepted as a fact that man is unhappy, accepted, 
I think, by most faiths over the world. Indeed, it 
is the belief that has been, one thinks, the cause 
of faiths. Had the world been happy, surely there 
had been no need of religions. In a summer sea, 
where is the need of havens ? It is a generally 
accepted fact, accepted, as I have said, without 
explanation. But the Buddhist has not been con- 
tented to leave it so. He has thought that it is in 
the right explanation of this cardinal fact that lies 
all truth. Life suffers from a disease called misery. 
He would be free from it. ' Let us, then,' says the 
Buddhist, ' first discover the cause of this misery, 
and so only can we understand how to cure it' 

It is this explanation which is really the dis- 
tinguishing tenet of Buddhism, which differentiates 
it from all other faiths and all philosophies. 

The reason, says Buddhism, why men are un- 
happy is that they are alive. Life and sorrow 
are inseparable — nay, they are one and the same 
thing. The mere fact of being alive is a misery. 
When you have clear eyes and discern the truth, 
you shall see this without a doubt, says the Buddhist. 
For consider, What man has ever sat down and 
said : * Now am I in perfect happiness ; just as I 



46 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

now am would I like to remain for ever and for 
ever without change ' ? No man has ever done so. 
What men desire is change. They weary of the 
present, and desire the future ; and when the future 
comes they find it no better than the past. Happi- 
ness lies in yesterday and in to-morrow, but never 
in to-day. In youth we look forward, in age we 
look back. What is change but the death of the 
present? Life is change, and change is death, so 
says the Buddhist. Men shudder at and fear death, 
and yet death and life are the same thing — in- 
separable, indistinguishable, and one with sorrow. 
We men who desire life are as men athirst and 
drinking of the sea. Every drop we drink of the 
poisoned sea of existence urges on men surely to 
greater thirst still. Yet we drink on blindly, and 
say that we are athirst. 

This is the explanation of Buddhism. The world 
is unhappy because it is alive, because it does not 
see that what it should strive for is not life, not 
change and hurry and discontent and death, but 
peace — the Great Peace. There is the goal to 
which a man should strive. 

See now how different it is from the Christian 
theory. In Christianity there are two lives — this 
and the next. The present is evil, because it is 
under the empire of the devil — the world, the flesh, 
and the devil. The next will be beautiful, because it 
is under the reign of God, and the devil cannot intrude. 
But Buddhism acknowledges only one life — an 
existence that has come from the forever, that may 
extend to the forever. If this life is evil, then is 
all life evil, and happiness can live but in peace. 



IV WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 47 

in surcease from the troubles of this weary world. 
If, then, a man desire happiness — and in all faiths 
that is the desired end — he must strive to attain 
peace. This, again, is not a difficult idea to under- 
stand. It seems to me so simple that, when once 
it has been listened to, it may be understood by 
a child. I do not say believed and followed, but 
understood. Belief is a different matter. The law 
is deep ; it is difficult to know and to believe it. It 
is very sublime, and can be comprehended only by 
means of earnest meditation,' for Buddhism is not a 
religion of children, but of men. 

This is the doctrine that has caused Buddhism to 
be called pessimism. Taught, as we have been 
taught, to believe that life and death are antagonistic, 
that life in the world to come is beautiful, that death 
is a horror, it seems to us terrible to think that it 
is indeed our very life itself that is the evil to be 
eradicated, and that life and death are the same. 
But to those that have seen the truth, and believed 
it, it is not terrible, but beautiful. When you have 
cleansed your eyes from the falseness of the flesh, 
and come face to face with truth, it is beautiful. 
* The law is sweet, filling the heart with joy.' 

To the Buddhist, then, the end to be obtained is 
the Great Peace, the mighty deliverance from all 
sorrow. He must strive after peace ; on his own 
efforts depends success or failure. 

When the end and the agent have been deter- 
mined, there remains but to discover the means, the 
road whereby the end may be reached. How shall 
a man so think and so act that he shall come at 
length unto the Great Peace? And the answer of 



48 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Buddhism to this question is here : good deeds and 
good thoughts — these are the gate wherein alone 
you may enter into the way. Be honourable and 
just, be kind and compassionate, truth-loving and 
averse to wrong — this is the beginning of the road 
that leads unto happiness. Do good to others, not 
in order that they may do good to you, but because, 
by doing so, you do good to your own soul. Give 
alms, and be charitable, for these things are necessary 
to a man. Above all, learn love and sympathy. 
Try to feel as others feel, try to understand them, 
try to sympathize with them, and love will come. 
Surely he was a Buddhist at heart who wrote : 
' Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.' There is 
no balm to a man's heart like love, not only the 
love others feel towards him, but that he feels 
towards others. Be in love with all things, not 
only with your fellows, but with the whole world, 
with every creature that walks the earth, with the 
birds in the air, with the insects in the grass. All 
life is akin to man. Man's life is not apart from 
other life, but of it, and if a man would make his 
heart perfect, he must learn to sympathize with and 
understand all the great world about him. But he 
must always remember that he himself comes first. 
To make others just, you must yourself be just ; to 
make others happy, you must yourself be happy 
first ; to be loved, you must first love. Consider 
your own soul, to make it lovely. Such is the 
teaching of Buddha. But if this were all, then would 
Buddhism be but a repetition of the commonplaces 
of all religions, of all philosophies. In this teaching 
of righteousness is nothing new. Many teachers 



IV WAY TO THE GREAT PEACE 49 

have taught it, and all have learnt in the end that 
righteousness is no sure road to happiness, to peace. 
Buddhism goes farther than this. Honour and 
righteousness, truth and love, are, it says, very 
beautiful things, but are only the beginning of the 
way ; they are but the gate. In themselves they 
will never bring a man home to the Great Peace. 
Herein lies no salvation from the troubles of the 
world. Far more is required of a man than to be 
righteous. Holiness alone is not the gate to happi- 
ness, and all that have tried have found it so. It 
alone will not give man surcease from pain. When 
a man has so purified his heart by love, has so 
weaned himself from wickedness by good acts and 
deeds, then he shall have eyes to see the further way 
that he should go. Then shall appear to him the 
truth that it is indeed life that is the evil to be 
avoided ; that life is sorrow, and that the man who 
would escape evil and sorrow must escape from life 
itself — not in death. The death of this life is but 
the commencement of another, just as, if you dam a 
stream in one direction, it will burst forth in another. 
To take one's life now is to condemn one's self to 
longer and m^ore miserable life hereafter. The end 
of misery lies in the Great Peace. A man must 
estrange himself from the world, which is sorrow. 
Hating struggle and fight, he will learn to love 
peace, and to so discipline his soul that the world 
shall appear to him clearly to be the unrest which it 
is. Then, when his heart is fixed upon the Great 
Peace, shall his soul come to it at last. Weary of 
the earth, it shall come into the haven where there 
are no more storms, where there is no more struggle, 

E 



50 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.iv 

but where reigns unutterable peace. It is not death, 
but the Great Peace. 

' Ever pure, and mirror bright and even, 
Life among the immortals glides away ; 
Moons are waning, generations changing, 
Their celestial life flows everlasting, 
Changeless 'midst a ruined world's decay.' 

This is Nirvana, the end to which we must all 
strive, the only end that there can be to the trouble 
of the world. Each man must realize this for him- 
self, each man will do so surely in time, and all will 
come into the haven of rest. Surely this is a simple 
faith, the only belief that the world has known that 
is free from mystery and dogma, from ceremony and 
priestcraft ; and to know that it is a beautiful faith 
you have but to look at its believers and be sure. 
If a people be contented in their faith, if they love 
it and exalt it, and are never ashamed of it, and if it 
exalts them and makes them happy, what greater 
testimony can you have than that? 

It will seem that indeed I have compressed the 
teaching of this faith into too small a space — this 
faith about which so many books have been written, 
so much discussion has taken place. But I do not 
think it is so. I cannot see that even in this short 
chapter I have left out anything that is important in 
Buddhism. It is such a simple faith that all may be 
said in a very few words. It would be, of course, 
possible to refine on and gloze over certain points of 
the teaching. The real proof of the faith is in the 
results, in the deeds that men do in its name. Dis- 
cussion will not alter these one way or another. 



^ 



CHAPTER V 



WAR- 



' Love each other and live in peace. ' 

Saying of the Buddha. 



This is the Buddhist belief as I have understood it, 
and I have written so far in order to explain what 
follows. For my object is not to explain what the 
Buddha taught, but what the Burmese believe ; and 
this is not quite the same thing, thought' in nearly 
every action of their life the influence of Buddhism 
is visible more or less strongly. ) Therefore I propose 
to describe shortly the ideas of the Burmese people 
upon the main objects of life ; and to show how 
much or how little Buddhism has affected their con- 
ceptions. I will begin with courage. 

I think it will be evident that there is no quality 
upon which the success of a nation so much depends 
as upon its courage. No nation can rise to a high 
place without being brave ; it cannot maintain its 
independence even ; it cannot push forward upon 
any path of life without courage. Nations that are 
cowards must fail. 

I am aware that the courage of a nation depends, 
as do its other qualities, upon many things : its 

51 



52 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

situation with regard to other nations, its climate, its 
occupations. It is a great subject that I cannot go 
into. I wish to take all such things as I find them, 
and to discuss only the effect of the religion upon 
the courage of the people, upon its fighting capa- 
bilities. That religion may have a very serious 
effect one way or the other, no one can doubt. I 
went through the war of annexation, from 1885 to 
1889, and from it I will draw my examples. 

When we declared war in Upper Burma, and the 
column advanced up the river in November 1885, 
there was hardly any opposition. A little fight 
there was at the frontier fort of Minhla, but beyond 
that nothing. The river that might have been 
blocked was open ; the earthworks had no cannon, 
the men no guns. Such a collapse was never seen. 
There was no organization, no material, no money. 
The men wanted officers to command and teach 
them ; the officers wanted authority and ability to 
command. The people looked to their rulers to 
repel the invaders ; the rulers looked to the people. 
There was no common intelligence or will between 
them. Everything was wanting ; nothing was as it 
should be. And so Mandalay fell without a shot, 
and King Thibaw, the young, incapable, kind- 
hearted king, was taken into captivity. 

That was the end of the first act, brief and blood- 
less. For a time the people were stupefied. They 
could not understand what had happened ; they 
could not guess what was going to happen. They 
expected that the English would soon retire, and 
that then their own government would reorganize 
itself Meanwhile they kept quiet. 



V WAR 53 

It is curious to think how peaceful the country 
really was from November 1885 till June 1886. 
And then the trouble came. The people had by 
that time, even in the wild forest villages, begun 
to understand that we wanted to stay, that we did 
not intend going away unless forced to. They felt 
that it was of no further use looking to Mandalay 
for help. We had begun, too, to consider about 
collecting taxes, to interfere with the simple 
machinery of local affairs, to show that we meant to 
govern. And as the people did not desire to be 
governed — certainly not by foreigners, at least — they 
began to organize resistance. They looked to their 
local leaders for help, and, as too often these local 
governors were not very capable men, they sought, 
as all people have done, the assistance of such men 
of war as they could find — brigands, and freelances, 
and the like — and put themselves under their orders. 
The whole country rose, from Bhamo to Minhla, 
from the Shan Plateau to the Chin Mountains. All 
Upper Burma was in a passion of insurrection, a 
very fury of rebellion against the usurping foreigners. 
Our authority was confined to the range of our guns. 
Our forts were attacked, our convoys ambushed, 
our steamers fired into on the rivers. There was 
no safety for an Englishman or a native of India, 
save within the lines of our troops, and it was soon 
felt that these troops were far too few to cope with 
the danger. To overthrow King Thibaw was easy, 
to subdue the people a very different thing. 

It is almost impossible to describe the state of 
Upper Burma in 1886. It must be remembered 
that the central government was never very strong 



54 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

— in fact, that beyond collecting a certain amount 
of taxes, and appointing governors to the different 
provinces, it hardly made itself felt outside Mandalay 
and the large river towns. The people to a great 
extent governed themselves. They had a very 
good system of village government, and managed 
nearly all their local affairs. But beyond the 
presence of a governor, there was but little to attach 
them to the central government. There was, and 
is, absolutely no aristocracy of any kind at all. The 
Burmese are a community of equals, in a sense that 
has probably never been known elsewhere. All 
their institutions are the very opposite to feudalism. 
Now, feudalism was instituted to be useful in war. 
The Burmese customs were instituted that men 
should live in comfort and ease during peace ; they 
were useless in war. So the natural leaders of a 
people, as in other countries, were absent. There 
were no local great men ; the governors were men 
appointed from time to time from Mandalay, and 
usually knew nothing of their charges ; there were 
no rich men, no large landholders — not one. There 
still remained, however, one institution that other 
nations have made useful in war, namely, the 
organization of religion. For Buddhism is fairly 
well organized — certainly much better than ever the 
government was. It has its heads of monasteries, 
its Gaing-dauks, its Gaing-oks, and finally the 
Thathanabaing, the head of the Burmese Buddhism. 
The overthrow of King Thibaw had not injured any 
of this. This was an organization in touch with the 
whole people, revered and honoured by every man 
and woman and child in the country. In this 



V WAR 55 

terrible scene of anarchy and confusion, in this death 
peril of their nation, what were the monks doing ? 

We know what religion can do. We have seen 
how it can preach war and resistance, and can 
organize that war and resistance. We know what 
ten thousand priests preaching in ten thousand 
hamlets can effect in making a people almost un- 
conquerable, in directing their armies, in strengthen- 
ing their determination. We remember La Vendee, 
we remember our Puritans, and we have had 
recent experience in the Soudan. We know what 
Christianity has done again and again ; what Judaism, 
what Mahommedanism, what many kinds of pagan- 
ism, have done. 

To those coming to Burma in those days, fresh 
from the teachings of Europe, remembering recent 
events in history, ignorant of what Buddhism means, 
there was nothing more surprising than the fact 
that in this war religion had no place. They rode 
about and saw the country full of monasteries ; they 
saw the monasteries full of monks, whom they called 
priests ; they saw that the people were intensely 
attached to their religion ; they had daily evidence 
that Buddhism was an. abiding faith in the hearts of 
the people. And yet, for all the assistance it was 
to them in the war, the Burmese might have had no 
faith at all. 

The explanation is, that the teachings of the 
Buddha forbid war. All killing is wrong, all war 
is hateful ; nothing is more terrible than this destroy- 
ing of your fellow-man. There is absolutely no 
getting free of this commandment. The teaching 
of the Buddha is that you must strive to make your 



56 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

own soul perfect. This is the first of all things, and 
comes before any other consideration. Of the virtues 
that only war can create and nourish this teaching 
knows nothing. Be pure and kind-hearted, full of 
charity and compassion, and so you may do good to 
others. These are the vows the Buddhist monks 
make, these are the vows they keep ; and so it 
happened that all that great organization was useless 
to the patriot fighter, was worse than useless, for it 
was against him. The whole spectacle of Burma in 
those days, with the country seething with strife, and 
the monks going about their business calmly as ever, 
begging their bread from door to door, preaching of 
peace, not war, of kindness, not hatred, of pity, not 
revenge, was to most foreigners quite inexplicable. 
They could not understand it. I remember a friend 
of mine with whom I went through many experiences 
speaking of it with scorn. He was a cavalry officer, 
* the model of a light cavalry ofiBcer ' ; he had with 
him a squadron of his regiment, and we were trying 
to subdue a very troubled part of the country. 

We were camping in a monastery, as we fre- 
quently did — a monastery on a hill near a high 
golden pagoda. The country all round was under 
the sway of a brigand leader, and sorely the villagers 
suffered at his hands now that he had leapt into 
unexpected power. The villages were half aban- 
doned, the fields untilled, the people full of unrest ; 
but the monasteries were as full of monks as ever ; 
the gongs rang, as they ever did, their message 
through the quiet evening air ; the little boys were 
taught there just the same ; the trees were watered 
and the gardens swept as if there were no change 



V WAR 57 

at all — as if the king were still on his golden throne, 
and the English had never come ; as if war had 
never burst upon them. And to us, after the very 
different scenes we saw now and then, saw and 
acted in, these monks and their monasteries were 
difficult to understand. The religion of the Buddha 
thus professed was strange. 

' What is the use,' said my friend, ' of this religion 
that we see so many signs of? Suppose these men 
had been Jews or Hindus or Mussulmans, it would 
have been a very different business, this war. These 
yellow - robed monks, instead of sitting in their 
monasteries, would have pervaded the country, 
preaching against us and organizing. No one 
organizes better than an ecclesiastic. We should 
have had them leading their men into action with 
sacred banners, and promising them heaven here- 
after when they died. They would have made 
Ghazis of them. Any one of these is a religion 
worth having. But what is the use of Buddhism ? 
What do these monks do ? I never see them in 
a fight, never hear that they are doing anything 
to organize the people. It is, perhaps, as well for 
us that they do not. But what is the use of 
Buddhism ? ' 

So, or somewhat like this, spoke my friend, 
spe^-king as a soldier. Each of us speaks from 
our own standpoint. He was a brilliant soldier, 
and a religion was to him a sword, a thing to fight 
with. That v/as one of the first uses of a religion. 
He knew nothing of Buddhism ; he cared to know 
nothing, beyond whether it would fight. If so, it 
was a good religion in its way. If not, then not. 



58 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Religion meant to him something that would 
help you in your trouble, that would be a stay and 
a comfort, a sword wherewith to confront your 
enemies and a prop for yourself. Though he was 
himself an invader, he felt that the Burmans did no 
wrong in resisting him. They fought for their 
homes, as he would have fought ; and their religion, 
if of any value, should assist them. It should urge 
them to battle, and promise them peace and happiness 
if dying in a good cause. His faith would do this 
for him. What was Buddhism doing ? What help 
did it give to its believers in their extremity ? It 
gave none. Think of the peasant lying there in 
the ghostly dim-lit fields waiting to attack us at 
the dawn. Where was his help ? He thought, 
perhaps, of his king deported, his village invaded, 
his friends killed, himself reduced to the subject of 
a far-off queen. He would fight — yes, even though 
his faith told him not. There was no help there. 
His was no faith to strengthen his arm, to straighten 
his aim, to be his shield in the hour of danger. 

If he died, if in the strife of the morning's fight 
he were to be killed, if a bullet were to still his 
heart, or a lance to pierce his chest, there was no 
hope for him of the glory of heaven. No, but every 
fear of hell, for he was sinning against the laws of 
righteousness — ' Thou shalt take no life.' There is 
no exception to that at all, not even for a patriot 
fighting for his country. * Thou shalt not take the 
life even of him who is the enemy of your king and 
nation.' He could count on no help in breaking the 
everlasting laws that the Buddha has revealed to us. 
If he went to his monks, they could but say : ' See 




V WAR 59 

the law, the unchangeable law that man is subject to. 
There is no good thing but peace, no sin like strife t/« 
and war.' That is what the followers of the great 
teacher would tell the peasant yearning for help to 
strike a blow upon the invaders. The law is the , 
same for all. There is not one law for you and 
another for the foreigner ; there is not one law to- 
day and another to-morrow. Truth is for ever and 
for ever. It cannot change even to help you in 
your extremity. Think of the English soldier and 
the Burmese peasant. Can there be anywhere a 
greater contrast than this ? 

Truly this is not a creed for a soldier, not a creed 
for a fighting-man of any kind, for what the soldier 
wants is a personal god who will always be on his 
side, always share his opinions, always support him 
against everyone else. But a law that points out 
unalterably that right is always right, and wrong 
always wrong, that nothing can alter one into the 
other, nothing can ever make killing righteous and 
violence honourable, that is no creed for a soldier. 
And Buddhism has ever done this. It never bent 
to popular opinion, never made itself a tool in the 
hands of worldly passion. It could not. You might 
as well say to gravity, ' I want to lift this stone ; 
please don't act on it for a time,' as expect Buddhism 
to assist you to make war. Buddhism is the un- 
alterable law of righteousness, and cannot ally itself 
with evil, cannot ever be persuaded that under any 
circumstances evil can be good. 

And so the Burmese peasant had to fight his 
own fight in 1885 alone. His king was gone, his 
government broken up, he had no leaders. He had 




6o THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

no god to stand beside him when he fired at the 
foreign invaders ; and when he lay a-dying, with a 
bullet in his throat, he had no one to open to him 
the gates of heaven. 

And yet he fought — with every possible dis- 
couragement he fought, and sometimes he fought 
well. It has been thrown against him as a reproach 
that he did not do better. Those who have said 
this have never thought, never counted up the 
odds against him, never taken into consideration 
how often he did well. 

Here was a people — a very poor people of peasants 
— with no leaders, absolutely none ; no aristocracy 
of any kind, no cohesion, no fighting religion. They 
had for their leaders outlaws and desperadoes, and 
for arms old flint-lock guns and soft iron swords. 
Could anything be expected from this except what 
actually did happen ? And yet they often did well, 
their natural courage overcoming their bad weapons, 
their passionate desire of freedom giving them the 
necessary impulse. 

In 1886, as I have said, all Burma was up. 
Even in the lower country, which we held for so 
long, insurrection was spreading fast, and troops 
and military police were being poured in from 
India. 

There is above Mandalay a large trading village 
— a small town almost — called Shemmaga. It is 
the river port for a large trade in salt from the 
inner country, and it was important to hold it. The 
village lay along the river bank, and about the 
middle of it, some two hundred yards from the river, 
rises a small hill. Thus the village was a triangle, 



V WAR 6i 

with the base on the river, and the hill as apex. 
On the hill were some monasteries of teak, from 
which the monks had been ejected, and three hundred 
Ghurkas were in garrison there. A strong fence ran 
from the hill to the river like two arms, and there 
were three gates, one just by the hill, and one on 
each end of the river face. 

Behind Shemmaga the country was under the rule 
of a robber chief called Maung Yaing, who could raise 
from among the peasants some two hundred or three 
hundred men, armed mostly with flint-locks. He 
had been in the king's time a brigand with a small 
number of followers, who defied or eluded the local 
authorities, and lived free in quarters among the 
most distant villages. Like many a robber chief in 
our country and elsewhere, he was liked rather than 
hated by the people, for his brutalities were confined 
to either strangers or personal enemies, and he was 
open-handed and generous. We look upon things 
now with different eyes to what we did two or three 
hundred years ago, but I dare say Maung Yaing 
was neither better nor worse than many a hero of 
ours long ago. He was a fairly good fighter, and 
had a little experience fighting the king's troops ; 
and so it was very natural, when the machinery of 
government fell like a house of cards, and some 
leaders were wanted, that the young men should 
crowd to him, and put themselves under his orders. 
He had usually with him forty or fifty men, but he 
could, as I have said, raise five or six times as many 
for any particular service, and keep them together 
for a few days. He very soon discovered that he 
and his men were absolutely no match for our troops. 



62 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

In two or three attempts that he made to oppose the 
troops he was signally worsted, so he was obliged 
to change his tactics. He decided to boycott the 
enemy. No Burman was to accept service under 
him, to give him information or supplies, to be his 
guide, or to assist him in any way. This rule Maung 
Yaing made generally known, and he announced 
his intention of enforcing it with rigour. And he 
did so. There was a head man of a village near 
Shemmaga whom he executed because he had acted 
as guide to a body of troops, and he cut off all 
supplies from the interior, lying on the roads, and 
stopping all men from entering Shemmaga. He 
further issued a notice that the inhabitants of Shem- 
maga itself should leave the town. They could not 
move the garrison, therefore the people must move 
themselves. No assistance must be given to the 
enemy. The villagers of Shemmaga, mostly small 
traders in salt and rice, were naturally averse to 
leaving. This trade was their only means of liveli- 
hood, the houses their only homes, and they did not 
like the idea of going out into the unknown country 
behind. Moreover, the exaction by Maung Yaing 
of money and supplies for his men fell most heavily 
on the wealthier men, and on the whole they were 
not sorry to have the English garrison in the town, 
so that they could trade in peace. Some few left, 
but most did not, and though they collected money, 
and sent it to Maung Yaing, they at the same time 
told the English officer in command of Maung 
Yaing's threats, and begged that great care should 
be taken of the town, for Maung Yaing was very 
angry. When he found he could not cause the 



V WAR 63 

abandonment of the town, he sent in word to say 
that he would burn it. Not three hundred foreigners, 
nor three thousand, should protect these lazy, un- 
patriotic folk from his vengeance. He gave them 
till the new moon of a certain month, and if th-e town 
were not evacuated by that time he declared that he 
would destroy it. He would burn it down, and kill 
certain men whom he mentioned, who had been the 
principal assistants of the foreigners. This warn- 
ing was quite public, and came to the ears of the 
English officer almost at once. When he heard it 
he laughed. 

He had three hundred men, and the rebels had 
three hundred. His were all magnificently trained 
and drilled troops, men made for war ; the Burmans 
were peasants, unarmed, untrained. He could have 
defeated three thousand of them, or ten times that 
number, with his little force, and so, of course, he 
could if he met them in the open ; no one knew 
that better, by bitter experience, than Maung Yaing. 
The villagers, too, knew, but nevertheless they were 
stricken with fear, for Maung Yaing was a man of 
his word. He was as good as his threat. 

One night, at midnight, the face of the fort 
where the Ghurkas lived on the hill was suddenly 
attacked. Out of the brushwood near by a heavy 
fire was opened upon the breastwork, and there was 
shouting and beating of gongs. So all the Ghurkas 
turned out in a hurry, and ran to man the breast- 
work, and the return fire became hot and heavy. In 
a moment, as it seemed, the attackers were in the 
village. They had burst in the north gate by the 
river face, killed the guard on it, and streamed in. 



64 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

They lit torches from a fire they found burning, and 
in a moment the village was on fire. Looking down 
from the hill, you could see the village rushing into 
flame, and in the lurid light men and women and 
children running about wildly. There were shouts 
and screams and shots. No one who has never 
heard it, never seen it, can know what a village is 
like when the enemy has burst in at night. Every- 
one is mad with hate, with despair, with terror. 
They run to and fro, seeking to kill, seeking to 
escape being killed. No one can tell one from 
another. The bravest man is dismayed. And the 
noise is like a great moan coming out of the night, 
pierced with sharp cries. It rises and falls, like the 
death-cry of a dying giant. It is the most terrible 
sound in the world. It makes the heart stop. 

To the Ghurkas this sight and sound came all of 
a sudden, as they were defending what they took 
to be a determined attack on their own position. 
The village was lost ere they knew it was attacked. 
And two steamers full of troops, anchored off the 
town, saw it, too. They were on their way up 
country, and had halted there that night, anchored 
in the stream. They were close by, but could not 
fire, for there was no telling friend from foe. 

And before the relief party of Ghurkas could 
come swarming down the hill, only two hundred 
yards, before the boats could land the eager troops 
from the steamers, the rebels were gone. They went 
through the village and out of the south gate. They 
had fulfilled their threat and destroyed the town. 
They had killed the men they had declared they 
would kill. The firing died away from the fort side, 



V WAR 65 

and the enemy were gone, no one could tell whither, 
into the night. 

Such a scene of desolation as that village was 
next day ! It was all destroyed — every house. All 
the food was gone, all furniture, all clothes, every- 
thing, and here and there was a corpse in among 
the blackened cinders. The whole countryside was 
terror-stricken at this failure to defend those who 
had depended on us. 

I do not think this was a particularly gallant act, 
but it was a very able one. It was certainly war. 
It taught us a very severe lesson — more severe than 
a personal reverse would have been. It struck terror 
in the countryside. The memory of it hampered us 
for very long ; even now they often talk of it. It was 
a brutal act — that of a brigand, not a soldier. 

But there was no want of courage. If these men, 
inferior in number, in arms, in everything, could do 
this under the lead of a robber chief, what would 
they not have done if well lead, if well trained, if 
well armed ? 

Of desperate encounters between our troops and 
the insurgents I could tell many a story. I have 
myself seen such fights. They nearly always ended 
in our favour — how could it be otherwise ? 

There was Ta Te, who occupied a pagoda en- 
closure with some eighty men, and was attacked by 
our mounted infantry. There was a long fight in that 
hot afternoon, and very soon the insurgents' ammuni- 
tion began to fail, and the pagoda was stormed. 
Many men were killed, and Ta Te, when his men 
were nearly all dead, and his ammunition quite ex- 
pended, climbed up the pagoda wall, and twisted off 

F 



66 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

pieces of the cement and threw them at the troops. 
He would not surrender — not he — and he was killed. 
There were many like him. The whole war was 
little affairs of this kind — a hundred, three hundred, 
of our men, and much the same, or a little more, 
of theirs. They only once or twice raised a force 
of two thousand men. Nothing can speak more 
forcibly of their want of organization than this. 
The whole country was pervaded by bands of fifty 
or a hundred men, very rarely amounting to more 
than two hundred, and no two bands ever acted in 
concert. 

It is probable that most of the best men of the 
country were against us. It is certain, I think, that 
of those who openly joined us and accompanied us 
in our expedition, very, very few were other than 
men who had some private grudge to avenge, or 
some purpose to gain, by opposing their own people. 
Of such as these you cannot expect very much. 
And yet there were exceptions — men who showed 
up all the more brilliantly because they were excep- 
tions — men whom I shall always honour. There 
were two I remember best of all. They are both 
dead now. 

One was the eldest son of the hereditary governor 
of a part of the country called Kawlin. It is in 
the north-west of Upper Burma, and bordered on 
a semi -independent state called Wuntho. In the 
troubles that occurred after the deposition of King 
Thibaw, the Prince of Wuntho thought that he 
would be able to make for himself an independent 
kingdom, and he began by annexing Kawlin. So 
the governor had to flee, and with him his sons, and 



V WAR 67 

naturally enough they joined our columns when we 
advanced in that direction, hoping to be replaced. 
They were replaced, the father as governor under 
the direction of an English magistrate, and the son 
as his assistant. They were only kept there by our 
troops, and upheld in authority by our power against 
Wuntho. But they were desired by many of their 
own people, and so, perhaps, they could hardly be 
called traitors, as many of those who joined us were. 
The father was a useless old man, but his son, he of 
whom I speak, was brave and honourable, good 
tempered and courteous, beyond most men whom 
I have met. It was well known that he was the 
real power behind his father. It was he who 
assisted us in an attempt to quell the insurrections 
and catch the raiders that troubled our peace, and 
many a time they tried to kill him, many a time to 
murder him as he slept. 

There was a large gang of insurgents who came 
across the Mu River one day, and robbed one of his 
villages, so a squadron of cavalry was sent in pursuit. 
We travelled fast and long, but we could not catch 
the raiders. We crossed the Mu into unknown 
country, following their tracks, and at last, being 
without guides, we camped that night in a little 
monastery in the forest. At midnight we were 
attacked. A road ran through our camp, and there 
was a picket at each end of the road, and sentries 
were doubled. 

It was just after midnight that the first shot was 
fired. We were all asleep when a sudden volley 
was poured into the south picket, killing one sentry 
and wounding another. There was no time to dress, 



68 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and we ran down the steps as we were (in sleeping 
dresses), to find the men rapidly falling in, and the 
horses kicking at their pickets. It was pitch-dark. 
The monastery was on a little cleared space, and 
there was forest all round that looked very black. 
Just as we came to the foot of the steps an outbreak 
of firing and shouts came from the north, and the 
Burmese tried to rush our camp from there ; then 
they tried to rush it again from the south, but all 
their attempts were baffled by the steadiness of the 
pickets and the reinforcements that were running up. 
So the Burmese, finding the surprise ineffectual, and 
that the camp could not be taken, spread them- 
selves about in the forest in vantage places, and fired 
into the camp. Nothing could be seen except the 
dazzling flashes from their guns as they fired here 
and there, and the darkness was all the darker for 
those flashes of flame, that cut it like swords. It 
was very cold. I had left my blanket in the monas- 
tery, and no one was allowed to ascend, because 
there, of all places, the bullets flew thickest, crush- 
ing through the mat walls, and going into the teak 
posts with a thud. There was nothing we could do. 
The men, placed in due order about the camp, fired 
back at the flashes of the enemy's guns. That was 
all they had to fire at. It was not much guide. 
The officers went from picket to picket encouraging 
the men, but I had no duty ; when fighting began 
my work as a civilian was at a standstill. I sat 
and shivered with cold under the monastery, and 
wished for the dawn. In a pause of the firing you 
could hear the followers hammering the pegs that 
held the foot-ropes of the horses. Then the dead 



V WAR 69 

and wounded were brought and put near me, and in 
the dense dark the doctor tried to find out what 
injuries the men had received, and dress them as 
well as he could. No light dare be lit. The night 
seemed interminable. There were no stars, for a 
dense mist hung above the trees. After an hour or 
two the firing slackened a little, and presently, with 
great caution, a little lamp, carefully shrouded with 
a blanket, was lit A sudden burst of shots that 
came splintering into the posts beside us caused 
the lamp to be hurriedly put out ; but presently it 
was lit again, and with infinite caution one man was 
dressed. At last a little very faint silver dawn came 
gleaming through the tree-tops — the most beautiful 
sight I ever saw — and the firing stopped. The 
dawn came quickly down, and very soon we were 
able once more to see what we were about, and 
count our losses. 

Then we moved out. We had hardly any hope 
of catching the enemy, we who were in a strange 
country, who were mounted on horses, and had a 
heavy transport, and they who knew every stream 
and ravine, and had every villager for a spy. So 
we moved back a march into a more open country, 
where we hoped for better news, and two days later 
that news came. 



CHAPTER VI 

WAR II 

* Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred. Hatred ceases 
by love.' — Da?)wiapada. 

We were camped at a little monastery in some 
fields by a village, with a river in front. Up in the 
monastery there was but room for the officers, so 
small was it, and the men were camped beneath 
it in little shelters. It was two o'clock, and very 
hot, and we were just about to take tiffin, when 
news came that a party of armed men had been 
seen passing a little north of us. It was supposed 
they were bound to a village known to be a very 
bad one — Laka — and that they would camp there. 
So ' boot and saddle ' rang from the trumpets, and 
in a few moments later we were off, fifty lances. 
Just as we started, his old Hindostani Christian 
servant came up to my friend, the commandant, and 
gave him a little paper. ' Put it in your pocket, 
sahib,' he said. The commandant had no time to 
talk, no time even to look at what it could be. 
He just crammed it into his breast - pocket, and 
we rode on. The governor's son was our guide, 

1^ 



CH. VI WAR 71 

and he led us through winding lanes into a pass 
in the low hills. The road was very narrow, and 
the heavy forest came down to our elbows as we 
passed. Now and again we crossed the stream, 
which had but little water in it, and the path 
would skirt its banks for awhile. It was beautiful 
country, but we had no time to notice it then, for 
we were in a hurry, and whenever the road would 
allow we trotted and cantered. After five or six 
miles of this we turned a spur of the hills, and 
came out into a little grass-glade on the banks of 
the stream, and at the far end of this was the village 
where we expected to find those whom we sought. 
They saw us first, having a look-out on a high tree 
by the edge of the forest ; and as our advanced 
guard came trotting into the open, he fired. The 
shot echoed far up the hills like an angry shout, 
and we could see a sudden stir in the village — men 
running out of the houses with guns and swords, 
and women and children running, too, poor things ! 
sick with fear. They fired at us from the village 
fence, but had no time to close the gate ere our 
sowars were in. Then they escaped in various 
ways to the forest and scrub, running like madmen 
across the little bit of open, and firing at us directly 
they reached shelter where the cavalry could not 
come. Of course, in the open they had no chance, 
but in the dense forest they were safe enough. 
The village was soon cleared, and then we had 
to return. It was no good to wait. The valley 
was very narrow, and was commanded from both 
its sides, which were very steep and dense with 
forest. Beyond the village there was only forest 



72 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

again. We had done what we could : we had 
inflicted a very severe punishment on them ; it was 
no good waiting, so we returned. They fired on 
us nearly all the way, hiding in the thick forest, and 
perched on high rocks. At one place our men had 
to be dismounted to clear a breastwork, run up to 
fire at us from. All the forest was full of voices 
— voices of men and women and even children — 
cursing our guide. They cried his name, that the 
spirits of the hills might remember that it was 
he who had brought desolation to their village. 
Figures started up on pinnacles of cliff, and cursed 
him as we rode by. Us they did . not curse ; it was 
our guide. 

And so after some trouble we got back. That 
band never attacked us again. 

As we were dismounting, my friend put his hand 
in his pocket, and found the little paper. He took 
it out, looked at it, and when his servant came 
up to him he gave the paper back with a curious 
little smile full of many thoughts. ' You see,' he 
said, * I am safe. No bullet has hit me.' And the 
servant's eyes were dim. He had been very long 
with his master, and loved him, as did all who knew 
him. ' It was the goodness of God,' he said — ' the 
great goodness of God. Will not the sahib keep 
the paper ? ' But the sahib would not. ' You may 
need it as well as I. Who can tell in this war ? ' 
And he returned it. 

And the paper ? It was a prayer — a prayer 
used by the Roman Catholic Church, printed on a 
sheet of paper. At the top was a red cross. The 
paper was old and worn, creased at the edges ; it 



VI WAR 73 

had evidently been much used, much read. Such 
was the charm that kept the soldier from danger. 

The nights were cold then, when the sun had set, 
and after dinner we used to have a camp-fire built of 
wood from the forest, to sit round for a time and 
talk before turning in. The native ofificers of the 
cavalry would come and sit with us, and one or 
two of the Burmans, too. We were a very mixed 
assembly. I remember one night very well — I 
think it must have been the very night after the 
fight at Laka, and we were all of us round the fire. 
I remember there was a half-moon bending towards 
the west, throwing tender lights upon the hills, and 
turning into a silver gauze the light white mist that 
lay upon the rice-fields. Opposite to us, across the 
little river, a ridge of hill ran down into the water 
that bent round its foot. The ridge was covered 
with forest, very black, with silver edges on the sky- 
line. It was out of range for a Burmese flint-gun, 
or we should not have camped so near it. On all 
the other sid^s the fields stretched away till they 
ended in the forest that gloomed beyond. I was 
talking to the governor's son (our guide of the fight 
at Laka) of the prospects of the future, and of the 
intentions of the Prince of Wuntho, in whose country 
Laka lay. I remarked to him how the Burmans of 
Wuntho seemed to hate him, of how they had cursed 
him from the hills, and he admitted that it was true. 
* All except my friends,' he said, ' hate me. And 
yet what have I done ? I had to help my father to 
get back his governorship. They forget that they 
attacked us first.' 

He went on to tell me of how every day he was 



74 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

threatened, of how he was sure they would murder 
him some time, because he had joined us. ' They 
are sure to kill me some time/ he said. He seemed 
sad and depressed, not afraid. 

So we talked on, and I asked him about charms. 
* Are there not charms that will prevent you being 
hurt if you are hit, and that will not allow a sword 
to cut you ? We hear of invulnerable men. There 
were the Immortals of the King's Guard, for instance.' 

And he said, yes, there were charms, but no one 
believed in them except the villagers. He did not, 
nor did men of education. Of course, the ignorant 
people believed in them. There were several sorts 
of charms. You could be tattooed with certain 
mystic letters that were said to insure you against 
being hit, and there were certain medicines you 
could drink. There were also charms made out of 
stone, such as a little tortoise he had once seen 
that was said to protect its wearer. There were 
mysterious writings on palm-leaves. There were 
men, he said vaguely, who knew how to make 
these things. For himself, he did not believe in 
them. 

I tried to learn from him then, and I have tried 
from others since, whether these charms have any 
connection with Buddhism. I cannot find that they 
have. They are never in the form of images of the 
Buddha, or of extracts from the sacred writings. 
There is not, so far as I can make out, any religious 
significance in these charms ; mostly they are simply 
mysterious. I never heard that the people connect 
them with their religion. Indeed, all forms of en- 
chantment and of charms are most strictly prohibited. 



VI WAR 75 

One of the vows that monks take is never to have 
any dealings with charms or with the supernatural, 
and so Buddhism cannot even give such little assist- 
ance to its believers as to furnish them with charms. 
If they have charms, it is against their faith ; it is a 
falling away from the purity of their teachings ; it is 
simply the innate yearning of man to the super- 
natural, to the mysterious. Man^s passions are very 
strong, and if he must fight, he must also have a 
charm to protect him in fight. If his religion 
cannot give it him, he must find it elsewhere. You 
see that, as the teachings of the Buddha have 
never been able to be twisted so as to permit 
war directly, neither have they been able to assist 
indirectly by furnishing charms, by making the 
fighter bullet-proof And I thought then of the 
little prayer and the cross that were so certain a 
defence against hurt. 

We talked for a long time in the waning moon- 
light by the ruddy fire, and at last we broke up to 
go to bed. As we rose a voice called to us across 
the water from the little promontory. In the still 
night every word was as clear as the note of a 

gong. 

* Sleep well,' it cried — ' sleep well — sle-e-ep 
we-1-1.' 

We all stood astonished — those who did not 
know Burmese wondering at the voice ; those who 
did, wondering at the meaning. The sentries peered 
keenly towards the sound. 

' Sleep well,' the voice cried again ; ' eat well. It 
will not be for long. Sleep well while you may.' 

And then, after a pause, it called the governor's 



76 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

son's name, and * Traitor, traitor ! ' till the hills were 
full of sound. 

The Burman turned away. 

'You see,' he said, 'how they hate me. What 
would be the good of charms ? ' 

The voice was quiet, and the camp sank into 
stillness, and ere long the moon set, and it was quite 
dark. 

He was a brave man, and, indeed, there are 
many brave men amongst the Burmese. They 
kill leopards with sticks and stones very often, and 
even tigers. They take their frail little canoes 
across the Irrawaddy in flood in a most daring 
way. They in no way want for physical courage, 
but they have never made a cult of bravery ; it 
has never been a necessity to them ; it has never 
occurred to them that it is the prime virtue of a 
man. You will hear them confess in the calmest 
way, * I was afraid.' We would not do that ; we 
should be much more afraid to say it. And the 
teaching of Buddhism is all in favour of this. No- 
where is courage — I mean aggressive courage — 
praised. No soldier could be a fervent Buddhist ; 
no nation of Buddhists could be good soldiers ; for 
not only does Buddhism not inculcate bravery, but 
it does not inculcate obedience. Each man is the 
ruler of his life, but the very essence of good fighting 
is discipline, and discipline, subjection, is unknown 
to Buddhism. Therefore the inherent courage of 
the Burmans could have no assistance from their 
faith in any way, but the very contrary : it fought 
against them. 

There is no flexibility in Buddhism. It is a law, 



VI WAR ^^i 

and nothing can change it. Laws are for ever and 
for ever, and there are no exceptions to them. The 
law of the Buddha is against war — war of any kind 
at all — and there can be no exception. And so 
every Burman who fought against us knew that he 
was sinning. He did it with his eyes open ; he 
could never imagine any exception in his favour. 
Never could he in his bivouac look at the stars, and 
imagine that any power looked down in approbation 
of his deeds. No one fought for him. Our bayonets 
and lances were no keys to open to him the gates of 
paradise ; no monks could come and close his dying 
eyes with promises of rewards to come. He was 
sinning, and he must suffer long and terribly for this 
breach of the laws of righteousness. 

If such be the faith of the people, and if they 
believe their faith, it is a terrible handicap to them 
in any fight : it delivers them bound into the hands 
of the enemy. And such is Buddhism. 

But it must never be forgotten that, if this faith 
does not assist the believer in defence, neither does 
it in offence. What is so terrible as a war of religion? 
There can never be a war of Buddhism. 

No ravished country has ever borne witness to 
the prowess of the followers of the Buddha ; no 
murdered men have poured out their blood on their 
hearth-stones, killed in his name ; no ruined women 
have cursed his name to high Heaven. He and his 
faith are clean of the stain of blood. He was the 
preacher of the Great Peace, of love, of charity, of 
compassion, and so clear is his teaching that it can 
never be misunderstood. Wars of invasion, the 
Burmese have waged, that is true, in Siam, in 



78 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch, vi 

Assam, and in Pegu. They are but men, and men 
will fight. If they were perfect in their faith the 
race would have died out long ago. They have 
fought, but they have never fought in the name of 
their faith. They have never been able to prostitute 
its teachings to their own wants. Whatever the 
Burmans have done, they have kept their faith pure.' 
When they have offended against the laws of the 
Buddha they have done so openly. Their souls are 
guiltless of hypocrisy, for whatever that may avail 
them ; they have known the difference between 
good and evil, even if they have not always followed 
the good. 



) • 



CHAPTER VII 

GOVERNMENT 

'Fire, water, storms, robbers, rulers — these are the five great evils.' 
— Btcr?}iese saying. 

It would be difficult, I think, to imagine anything 
worse than the government of Upper Burma in its 
later days. I mean by ' government ' the king and 
his counsellors and the greater officials of the empire. 
The management of foreign affairs, of the army, the 
suppression of greater crimes, the care of the means 
of communication, all those duties which fall to the 
central government, were badly done, if done at all. 
It must be remembered that there was one difficulty 
in the way — the absence of any noble or leisured 
class to be entrusted with the greater offices. As I 
have shown in another chapter, there was no one 
between the king and the villager — no noble, no 
landowner, no wealthy or educated class at all. 
The king had to seek for his ministers among the 
ordinary people, consequently the men who were 
called upon to fill great offices of state were as often 
as not men who had no experience beyond the 
narrow limits of a village. 

79 



1/ 



8o THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

The breadth of vie^, the knowledge of other 
countries, of other thoughts, that comes to those who 
have wealth and leisure, were wanting to these 
ministers of the king. Natural capacity many of 
them had, but that is not of much value until it is 
cultivated. You cannot learn in the narrow pre- 
cincts of a village the knowledge necessary to the 
management of great affairs ; and therefore in affairs 
of state this want of any noble or leisured class was 
a very serious loss to the government of Burma. 
It had great and countervailing advantages, of which 
I will speak when I come to local government, but 
that it was a heavy loss as far as the central govern- 
ment goes no one can doubt. There was none of 
that check upon the power of the king which a power- 
ful nobility will give ; there was no trained talent at 
his disposal. The king remained absolutely supreme, 
with no one near his throne, and the ministers were 
mere puppets, here to-day and gone to-morrow. 
They lived by the breath of the king and court, and 
when they lost favour there was none to help them. 
They had no faction behind them to uphold them 
against the king. It can easily be understood how 
disastrous all this was to any form of good govern- 
ment. All these ministers and governors were 
corrupt ; there was corruption to the core. 

When it is understood that hardly any official was 
paid, and that those who were paid were insufficiently 
paid, and had unlimited power, there will be no diffi- 
culty in seeing the reason. In circumstances like 
this all people would be corrupt. The only securities 
against bribery and abuse of power are adequate 
pay, restricted authority, and great publicity. None 



VII GOVERNMENT 8i 

of these obtained in Burma any more than in the 
Europe of five hundred years ago, and the result 
was the same in both. The central government 
consisted of the king, who had no limit at all to his 
power, and the council of ministers, whose only 
check was the king. The executive and judicial 
were all the same : there was no appeal from one 
to the other. The only appeal from the ministers 
was to the king, and as the king shut himself up 
in his palace, and was practically inaccessible to all 
but high officials, the worthlessness of this appeal 
is evident. Outside Mandalay the country was 
governed by wuns or governors. These were 
appointed by the king, or by the council, or by 
both, and they obtained their position by bribery. 
Their tenure was exceedingly insecure, as any man 
who came and gave a bigger bribe was likely to 
obtain the former governor's dismissal and his own 
appointment. Consequently the usual tenure of 
office of a governor was a year. Often there were 
half a dozen governors in a year ; sometimes a man 
with strong influence managed to retain his position 
for some years. From the orders of the governor 
there was an appeal to the council. This was in 
some matters useful, but in others not so. If a 
governor sentenced a man to death — all governors 
had power of life and death — he would be executed 
long before an appeal could reach the council. 
Practically no check was possible by the palace over 
distant governors, and they did as they liked. Any- 
thing more disastrous and fatal to any kind of good 
government than this it is impossible to imagine. 
The governors did what they considered right in 

G 



\J 



82 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

their own eyes, and made as much money as they 
could, while they could. They collected the taxes 
and as much more as they could get ; they 
administered the laws of Manu in civil and criminal 
affairs, except when tempted to deviate therefrom 
by good reasons ; they carried out orders received 
from Mandalay, when these orders fell in with their 
own desires, or when they considered that disobedi- 
ence might be dangerous. It is a Burmese proverb 
that officials are one of the five great enemies of 
mankind, and there was, I think (at all events in the 
latter days of the kingdom), good reason to remember 
it. And yet these officials were not bad men in 
themselves ; on the contrary, many of them were 
men of good purpose, of natural honesty, of right 
principles. In a well -organized system they would 
have done well, but the system was rotten to the 
core. 

It may be asked why the Burmese people 
remained quiet under such a rule as this ; why they 
did not rise and destroy it, raising a new one in its 
place ; how it was that such a state of corruption 
lasted for a year, let alone for many years. 

And the answer is this : However bad the 
government may have been, it had the qualities 
of its defects. If it did not do much to help the 
people, it did little to hinder them. To a great 
extent it left them alone to manage their own affairs 
in their own way. Burma in those days was like a 
great untended garden, full of weeds, full of flowers 
too, each plant striving after its own way, gradually 
evolving into higher forms. Now sometimes it 
seems to me to be like an old Dutch garden, with 



VII GOVERNMENT 83 

the paths very straight, very clean swept, with the 
trees clipped into curious shapes of bird and beast, 
tortured out of all knowledge, and many of the 
flowers mown down. The Burmese government left 
its people alone ; that was one great virtue. And, 
again, any government, however good, however bad, 
is but a small factor in the life of a people ; it 
comes far below many other things in importance, 
A short rainfall for a year is more disastrous than a 
mad king ; a plague is worse than fifty grasping 
governors ; social rottenness is incomparably more 
dangerous than the rottenest government. 

And in Burma it was only the supreme govern- 
ment, the high officials, that were very bad. It was 
only the management of state affairs that was feeble 
and corrupt ; all the rest was very good. The land 
laws, the self-government, the social condition of the 
people, were admirable. It was so good that the 
rotten central government made but little difference 
to the people, and it would probably have lasted for 
a long while if not attacked from outside. A 
greater power came and upset the government of 
the king, and established itself in his place ; and I 
may here say that the idea that the feebleness or 
wrong-doing of the Burmese government was the 
cause of the downfall is a mistake. If the Burmese 
government had been the best that ever existed, the 
annexation would have happened just the same. It 
was a political necessity for us. 

The central government of a country is, as I have 
said, not a matter of much importance. It has very 
little influence in the evolution of the soul of a 
people. It is always a great deal worse than the 



84 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

people themselves — a hundred years behind them 
in civilization, a thousand years behind them in 
morality. Men will do in the name of government 
acts which, if performed in a private capacity, would 
cover them with shame before men, and would land 
them in a gaol or worse. The name of govern- 
ment is a cloak for the worst passions of manhood. 
It is not an interesting study, the government of 
mankind. 

A government is no part of the soul of the people, 
but is a mere excrescence ; and so I have but little to 
say about this of Burma, beyond this curious fact — 
that religion had no part in it. Surely this is a very 
remarkable thing, that a religion having the hold 
upon its followers that Buddhism has upon the Bur- 
mese has never attempted to grasp the supreme 
authority and use it to its ends. 

It is not quite an explanation to say that Buddhism 
is not concerned with such things ; that its very 
spirit is against the assumption of any worldly power 
and authority ; that it is a negation of the value of 
these things. Something of this sort might be said 
of other religions, and yet they have all striven to 
use the temporal power. 

I do not know what the explanation is unless it 
be that the Burmese believe their religion and other 
people do not. However that may be, there is no 
doubt of the fact. Religion had nothing whatever 
— absolutely nothing in any way at all — to do with 
government. There are no exceptions. What has 
led people to think sometimes that there were excep- 
tions is the fact that the king confirmed the That- 
hanabaing — the head of the community of monks — 



VII GOVERNMENT 85 

after he had been elected by his fellow - monks. 
The reason of this was as follows : All ecclesiastical 
matters — I use the word ' ecclesiastical ' because I 
can find no other — were outside the jurisdiction of 
civil limits. By ' ecclesiastical ' I mean such matters 
as referred to the ownership and habitation of monas- 
teries, the building of pagodas and places of prayer, 
the discipline of the monkhood. Such questions 
were decided by ecclesiastical courts under the That- 
hanabaing. 

Now, it was necessary sometimes, as may be 
understood, to enforce these decrees, and for that 
reason to apply to civil power. Therefore there 
must be a head of the monks acknowledged by the 
civil power as head, to make such applications as 
might be necessary in this, and perhaps some other 
such circumstances. 

It became, therefore, the custom for the king to 
acknowledge by order the elect of the monks as 
Thathanabaing for all such purposes. That was all. 
The king did not appoint him at all. 

Any such idea as a monk interfering in the affairs 
of state, or expressing an opinion on war or law or 
finance, would appear to the Burmese a negation of 
their faith. They were never led away by the idea 
that good might come of such interference. This 
terrible snare has never caught their feet. They 
hold that a man's first duty is to his own soul. 
Never think that you can do good to others at the 
same time as you injure yourself, and the greatest 
good for your own heart is to learn that beyond all 
this turmoil and fret there is the Great Peace — so 
great that we can hardly understand it, and to reach 



86 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

it you must fit yourself for it. The monk is he who 
is attempting to reach it, and he knows that he cannot 
do that by attempting to rule his fellow-man ; that is 
probably the very worst thing he could do. And 
therefore the monkhood, powerful as they were, left 
all politics alone. I have never been able to hear of 
a single instance in which they even expressed an 
opinion either as a body or as individuals on any 
state matter. 

It is true that, if a governor oppressed his people, 
the monks would remonstrate with him, or even, in 
the last extremity, with the king ; they would plead 
with the king for clemency to conquered peoples, to 
rebels, to criminals ; their voice was always on the 
side of mercy. As far as urging the greatest of all 
virtues upon governors and rulers alike, they may 
be said to have interfered with politics ; but this is 
not what is usually understood by religion interfering 
in things of state. It seems to me we usually mean 
the reverse of this, for we are of late beginning to 
regard it with horror. The Burmese have always 
done so. They would think it a denial of all 
religion. 

And so the only things worth noting about the 
government of the Burmese were its exceeding 
badness, and its disconnection with religion. That 
it would have been a much stronger government 
had it been able to enlist on its side all the power 
of the monkhood, none can doubt. It might even 
have been a better government ; of that I am not 
sure. But that such a union would have meant the 
utter destruction of the religion, the debasing of the 
very soul of the people, no one who has tried to 



vii GOVERNMENT 87 

understand that soul can doubt. And a soul is 
worth very many governments. 

But when you left the central government, and 
came down to the management of local affairs, 
there was a great change. You came straight down 
from the king and governor to the village and its 
headman. There were no lords, no squires, nor 
ecclesiastical power wielding authority over the 
people. 

Each village was to a very great extent a self- 
governing community composed of men free in 
every way. The whole country was divided into 
villages, sometimes containing one or two hamlets 
at a little distance from each other — offshoots from 
the parent stem. The towns, too, were divided 
into quarters, and each quarter had its headman. 
These men held their appointment-orders from the 
king as a matter of form, but they were chosen by 
their fellow -villagers as a matter of fact. Partly 
this headship was hereditary, not from father to 
son, but it might be from brother to brother, and 
so on. It was not usually a very coveted appoint- 
ment, for the responsibility and trouble were con- 
siderable, and the pay small. It was lo per cent, 
on the tax collections. And with this official as 
their head, the villagers managed nearly all their 
affairs. Their taxes, for instance, they assessed 
and collected themselves. The governor merely 
informed the headman that he was to produce ten 
rupees per house from his village. The villagers 
then appointed assessors from among themselves, 
and decided how much each household should pay. 
Thus a coolie might pay but four rupees, and a rice- 



88 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

merchant as much as fifty or sixty. The assessment 
was levied according to the means of the villagers. 
So well was this done, that complaints against the 
decisions of the assessors were almost unknown — I 
might, I think, safely say were absolutely unknown. 
The assessment was made publicly, and each man 
was heard in his own defence before being assessed. 
Then the money was collected. If by any chance, 
such as death, any family could not pay, the de- 
ficiency was made good by the other villagers in 
proportion. When the money was got in it was 
paid to the governor. 

Crime such as gang-robbery, murder, and so on, 
had to be reported to the governor, and he arrested 
the criminals if he felt inclined, and knew who they 
were, and was able to do it. Generally something 
was in the way, and it could not be done. All 
lesser crime was dealt with in the village itself, not 
only dealt with when it occurred, but to a great 
extent prevented from occurring. You see, in a 
village anyone knows everyone, and detection is 
usually easy. If a man became a nuisance to a 
village, he was expelled. I have often heard old 
Burmans talking about this, and comparing these 
times with those. In those times all crimes were 
Punpunished, and there was but little petty crime. 
Now all big criminals are relentlessly hunted down 
by the police ; and the inevitable weakening of the 
village system has led to a large increase of petty 
crime, and certain breaches of morality and good 
conduct. I remember talking to a man not long 
ago — a man who had been a headman in the king's 
time, but was not so now. We were chatting of 



VII GOVERNMENT 89 

various subjects, and he told me he had no children ; 
they were dead. 

' When were you married ? ' I asked, just for 
something to say, and he said when he was thirty- 
two. 

' Isn't that rather old to be just married ? ' I 
asked. ' I thought you Burmans often married at 
eighteen and twenty. What made you wait so long ? ' 

And he told me that in his village men were 
not allowed to marry till they were about thirty. 
* Great harm comes,' he said, ' of allowing boys and 
girls to make foolish marriages when they are too 
young. It was never allowed in my village.' 

* And if a young man fell in love with a girl ? ' 
I asked. 

' He was told to leave her alone.' 
' And if he didn't ? ' 

* If he didn't, he was put in the stocks for one 
day or two days, and if that was no good, he was 
banished from the village.' 

A monk complained to me of the bad habits of 
the young men in villages. ' Could government do 
nothing ? ' he asked. They used shameful words, 
and they would shout as they passed his monastery, 
and disturb the lads at their lessons and the girls 
at the well. They were not well-behaved. In thel 
Burmese time they would have been punished for 
all this — made to draw so many buckets of water 
for the school- gardens, or do some road -making, 
or even be put in the stocks. Now the headman 
was afraid to do anything, for fear of the great 
government. It was very bad for the young men, \ 
he said. 



90 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

All villages were not alike, of course, in their 
enforcement of good manners and good morals, 
but, still, in every village they were enforced more 
or less. The opinion of the people was very 
decided, and made itself felt, and the influence of 
the monastery without the gate was strong upon 
the people. 

Yet the monks never interfered with village 
affairs. As they abstained from state government, 
so they did from local government. You never 
could imagine a Buddhist monk being a magistrate 
for his village, taking any part at all in municipal 
affairs. The same reasons that held them from 
affairs of the state held them from affairs of the 
commune. I need not repeat them. The monas- 
tery was outside the village, and the monk outside 
the community. I do not think he was ever con- 
sulted about any village matters. I know that, 
though I have many and many a time asked monks 
for their opinion to aid me in deciding little village 
disputes, I have never got an answer out of them. 
' These are not our affairs,' they will answer always. 
' Go to the people ; they will tell you what you 
want' Their influence is by example and precept, 
by teaching the laws of the great teacher, by living 
a life blameless before men, by preparing their souls 
for rest. It is a general influence, never a particular 
one. If anyone came to the monk for counsel, the 
monk would only repeat to him the sacred teaching, 
and leave him to apply it. 

So each village managed its own affairs, un- 
troubled by squire or priest, very little troubled by 
the state. That within their little means they did 



VII GOVERNMENT 91 

it well, no one can doubt. They taxed themselves 
without friction, they built their own monastery 
schools by voluntary effort, they maintained a very 
high, a very simple, code of morals, entirely of their 
own initiative. 

All this has passed, or is passing away. The 
king has gone to a banishment far across the sea, 
the ministers are either banished or powerless for 
good or evil. It will never rise again, this govern- 
ment of the king, which was so bad in all it did, 
and only good in what it left alone. It will never 
rise again. The people are now part of the British 
Empire, subjects of the Queen. What may be in 
store for them in the far future no one can tell, only 
we may be sure that the past can return no more. 
And the local government is passing away, too. It 
cannot exist with a strong government such as ours. 
For good or for evil, in a few years it, too, will be 
gone. 

But, after all, these are but forms ; the soul is 
far within. In the soul there will be no change. 
No one can imagine even in the far future any 
monk of the Buddha desiring temporal power, or 
interfering in any way with the government of the 
people. That is why I have written this chapter, 
to show how Buddhism holds itself towards the 
government. With us, we are accustomed to 
ecclesiastics trying to manage affairs of state, or 
attempting to grasp the secular power. It is in 
accordance with our ideals that they should do so. 
Our religious phraseology is full of such terms as 
lord and king and ruler and servant. Buddhism 
knows nothing of any of them. In our religion we 



92 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.vii 

are subject to the authority of deacons and priests 
and bishops and archbishops, and so on up to the 
Almighty Himself. But in Buddhism every man is 
free — free, subject to the inevitable laws of righteous- 
ness. There is no hierarchy in Buddhism : it is a 
religion of absolute freedom. No one can damn 
you except yourself; no one can save you except 
yourself. Governments cannot do it, and therefore 
it would be useless to try and capture the reins of 
government, even if you did not destroy your own 
soul in so doing. Buddhism does not believe that 
you can save a man by force. 

And as Buddhism was, so it is, so it will remain. 
By its very nature it abhors all semblance of 
authority. It has proved that, under temptation 
such as no other religion has felt, and resisted ; it 
is a religion of each man's own soul, not of govern- 
ments and powers. 



CHAPTER VIII 

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 

' Overcome anger by kindness, evil by good.' 

Dammapada. 

Not very many years ago an officer in Rangoon 
lost some currency notes. He had placed them 
upon his table overnight, and in the morning they 
were gone. The amount was not large. It was, 
if I remember rightly, thirty rupees ; but the loss 
annoyed him, and as all search and inquiry proved 
futile, he put the matter in the hands of the police. 

And before long — the very next day — the 
possession of the notes was traced to the officer's 
Burman servant, who looked after his clothes and 
attended on him at table. The boy was caught in 
the act of trying to change one of the notes. He 
was arrested, and he confessed. He was very hard 
up, he said, and his sister had written asking him to 
help her. He could not do so, and he was troubling 
himself about the matter early that morning while 
tidying the room, and he saw the notes on the 
table, and so he took them. It was a sudden 
temptation, and he fell. When the officer learnt 

93 



94 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

all this, he would, I think, have withdrawn from 
the prosecution and forgiven the boy ; but it was 
too late. In our English law theft is not com- 
poundable. A complaint of theft once made must 
be proved or disproved ; the accused must be tried 
before a magistrate. There is no alternative. So 
the lad — he was only a lad — was sent up before 
the magistrate, and he again pleaded guilty, and 
his master asked that the punishment might be 
light. The boy, he said, was an honest boy, and 
had yielded to a sudden temptation. He, the 
master, had no desire to press the charge, but the 
reverse. He would never have come to court at all 
if he could have withdrawn from the charge. There- 
fore he asked that the magistrate would consider all 
this, and be lenient. 

But the magistrate did not see matters in the 
same light at all. He would consider his judgment, 
and deliver it later on. 

When he came into court again and read the 
judgment he had prepared, he said that he was 
unable to treat the case leniently. There were 
many such cases, he said. It was becoming quite 
common for servants to steal their employers' things, 
and they generally escaped. It was a serious matter, 
and he felt himself obliged to make an example of 
such as were convicted, to be a warning to others. 
So the boy was sentenced to six months' rigorous 
imprisonment ; and his master went home, and before 
long had forgotten all about it. 

But one day, as he was sitting in his veranda 
reading before breakfast, a lad came quickly up the 
stairs and into the veranda, and knelt down before 



vm CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 95 

him. It was the servant. As soon as he was 
released from gaol, he went straight to his old 
master, straight to the veranda where he was sure 
he would be sitting at that hour, and begged to 
be taken back again into his service. He was quite 
pleased, and sure that his master would be equally 
pleased, at seeing him again, and he took it almost 
as a matter of course that he would be reinstated. 

But the master doubted. 

' How can I take you back again ? ' he said. 
* You have been in gaol.' 

' But,' said the boy, ' I did very well in gaol. I 
became a warder with a cap white on one side and 
yellow on the other. Let the thakin ask.' 

Still the officer doubted. 

' I cannot take you back,' he repeated. * You 
stole my money, and you have been in prison. I 
could not have you as a servant again.' 

' Yes,' admitted the boy, ' I stole the thakin's 
money, but I have been in prison for it a long time 
— six months. Surely that is all forgotten now. I 
stole ; I have been in gaol — that is the end of it.' 

'No,' answered the master, ' unfortunately, your 
having been in gaol only makes matters much worse. 
I could forgive the theft, but the being in gaol- — 
how can I forgive that ? ' 

And the boy could not understand. 

' If I have stolen, I have been in gaol for it. 
That is wiped out now,' he said again and again, 
till at last he went away in sore trouble of mind, for 
he could not understand his master, nor could his 
master understand him. 

Each had his own idea of what was law, and 



96 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

what was justice, and what was punishment. To 
the Burman all these words had one set of mean- 
ings ; to the Englishman they had another, a very- 
different one. And each of them took his ideas 
from his religion. To all men the law here on 
earth is but a reflection of the heavenly law ; the 
judge is the representative of his god. The justice 
of the court should be as the justice of heaven. 
Many nations have imagined their law to be heaven- 
given, to be inspired with the very breath of the 
Creator of the world. Other nations have derived 
their laws elsewhere. But this is of little account, 
for to the one, as to the other, the laws are a 
reflection of the religion. 

And therefore on a man's religion depends all 
his views of law and justice, his understanding of 
the word * punishment,' his idea of how sin should 
be treated. And it was because of their different 
religions, because their religions differed so greatly 
on these points as to be almost opposed, that the 
English officer and his Burman servant failed to 
understand each other. 

For to the Englishman punishment was a degra- 
dation. It seemed to him far more disgraceful that 
his servant should have been in gaol than that he 
should have committed theft. The theft he was 
ready to forgive, the punishment he could not. 
Punishment to him meant revenge. It is the 
revenge of an outraged and injured morality. The 
sinner had insulted the law, and therefore the law 
was to make him suffer. He was to be frightened 
into not doing it again. That is the idea. He 
was to be afraid of receiving punishment. And 



VIII CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 97 

again his punishment was to be useful as a warning 
to others. Indeed, the magistrate had especially 
increased it with that object in view. He was to 
suffer that others might be saved. The idea of 
punishment being an atonement hardly enters into 
our minds at all. To us it is practically a revenge. 
We do not expect people to be the better for it. 
We are sure they are the worse. It is a deterrent 
for others, not a healing process for the man himself 
We punish A. that B. may be afraid, and not do 
likewise. Our thoughts are bent on B., not really 
on A. at all. As far as he is concerned the process 
is very similar to pouring boiling lead into a wound. 
We do not wish or intend to improve him, but 
simply and purely to make him suffer. After we 
have dealt with him he is never fit again for human 
society. That was in the officer's thought when he 
refused to take back his Burmese servant. 

Now see the boy's idea. 

Punishment is an atonement, a purifying of the 
soul from the stain of sin. That is the only justifi- 
cation for, and meaning of, suffering. If a man 
breaks the everlasting laws of righteousness and 
stains his soul with the stain of sin, he must be 
purified, and the only method of purification is by 
suffering. Each sin is followed by suffering, lasting 
just so long as to cleanse the soul — not a moment 
less, or the soul would not be white ; not a moment 
more, or it would be useless and cruel That is the 
law of righteousness, the eternal inevitable sequence 
that leads us in the end to wisdom and peace. 
And as it is with the greater laws, so it should, the 
Buddhist thinks, be with the lesser laws. 

H 



98 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

If a man steals, he should have such punishment 
and for such a time as will wean his soul from theft, 
as will atone for his sin. Just so much. You see, 
to him mercy is a falling short of what is necessary, 
a leaving of work half done, as if you were to leave 
a garment half washed. Excess of punishment is 
mere useless brutality. He recognizes no vicarious 
punishment. He cannot understand that A. should 
be damned in order to save B. This does not 
agree with his scheme of righteousness at all. It 
seems as futile to him as the action of washing one 
garment twice that another might be clean. Each 
man should atone for his own sin, must atone for 
his own sin, in order to be freed from it. No one 
can help him, or suffer for him. If I have a sore 
throat, it would be useless to blister you for it : that 
is his idea. 

Consider this Burman. He had committed theft. 
That he admitted. He was prepared to atone for it. 
The magistrate was not content with that, but made 
him also atone for other men's sins. He was twice 
punished, because other men who escaped did ill. 
That was the first thing he could not understand. 
And then, when he had atoned both for his own 
sin and for that of others, when he came out of 
prison, he was looked upon as in a worse state than 
if he had never atoned at all. If he had never 
been in prison, his master would have forgiven his 
theft and taken him back, but now he would not. 
The boy was proud of having atoned in full, very 
full, measure for his sin ; the master looked upon 
the punishment as inconceivably worse than the 
crime. 



VIII CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 99 

So the officer went about and told the story 
of his boy coming back, and expecting to be taken 
on again, as a curious instance of the mysterious 
working of the Oriental mind, as another example 
of the extraordinary way Easterns argue. * Just to 
think/ said the officer, ' he was not ashamed of 
having been in prison ! ' And the boy ? Well, he 
probably said nothing, but went away and did not 
understand, and kept the matter to himself, for they 
are very dumb, these people, very long-suffering, 
very charitable. You may be sure that he never 
railed at the law, or condemned his old master for 
harshness. 

He would wonder why he was punished because 
other people had sinned and escaped. He could 
not understand that vicariousness of punishment is 
a Christian idea. It would not occur to him that 
sending him to herd with other criminals, that cutting 
him off from all the gentle influences of life, from the 
green trees and the winds of heaven, from the society 
of women, from the example of noble men, from the 
teachings of religion, was a curious way to render 
him a better man. He would suppose it was in- 
tended to make him better, that he should leave 
gaol a better man than when he entered, and he 
would take the intention for the deed. Under his 
own king things were not any better. It is true 
that very few men were imprisoned, fine being the 
usual punishment, but still, imprisonment there was, 
and it was very bad of its kind. No government 
has been able to invent anything better. But he 
would not compare our government with his, but 
our theory of punishment with the Buddhist theory, 



loo THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

what he had been taught at school. As to the 
conduct of his master, he would be content to leave 
that unexplained. The Buddhist is content to leave 
many things unexplained until he can see the mean- 
ing. He is not fond of theories. If he does not 
know, he says so. ' It is beyond me,' he will say ; 
* I do not understand.' He has no theory of an 
occidental mind to explain acts of ours of which 
he cannot grasp the meaning ; he would only not 
understand. 

But the pity of it — think of the pity of it all ! 
Surely there is nothing more pathetic than this : 
that a sinner should not understand the wherefore 
of his sentence, that the justice administered to him 
should be such as he cannot see the meaning of. 

Certain forms of crime are very rife in Burma. 
The villages are so scattered, the roads so lonely, 
the amount of money habitually carried about so 
large, the people so habitually careless, the difficulty 
of detection so great, that robbery and kindred 
crimes are very common ; and it is more common 
in the districts of the delta, long under our rule, 
than in the newly-annexed province in the north. 
Under like conditions the Burman is probably no 
more criminal and no less criminal than other 
people in the same state of civilization. Crime is a 
condition caused by opportunity, not by an inherent 
state of mind, except with the very few, the ex- 
ceptional individuals ; and in Upper Burma there 
is, now that the turmoil of the annexation is past, 
very little crime comparatively. There is less money 
there, and the village system — the control of the 



VIII CRIME AND PUNISHMENT loi 

community over the individual — the restraining 
influence of public opinion and of religion is greater. 
But even during the years of trouble, the years from 
1885 till 1890, when, in the words of the Burmese 
proverb, ' the forest was on fire and the wild-cat 
slapped his arm,' there were certain peculiarities 
about the criminals that differentiated them from 
those of Europe. You would hear of a terrible 
crime, a village attacked at night by brigands, a 
large robbery of property, one or two villagers 
killed, and an old woman tortured for her treasure, 
and you would picture the perpetrators as hardened, 
brutal criminals, lost to all sense of humanity, tigers 
in human shape ; and when you came to arrest 
them — if by good luck you did so — you would find 
yourself quite mistaken. One, perhaps, or two of 
the ringleaders might be such as I have described, 
but the others would be far different. They would 
be boys or young men led away by the idea of a 
frolic, allured by the romance of being a free-lance 
for a night, very sorry now, and ready to confess 
and do all in their power to atone for their mis- 
deeds. Nothing, I think, was more striking than 
the universal confession of criminals on their arrest. 
Even now, despite the spread of lawyers and notions 
of law, in country districts accused men always 
confess, sometimes even they surrender themselves.^ 
I have known many such cases. Here is one that 
happened to myself only the other day. 

A man was arrested in another jurisdiction for 
cattle theft ; he was tried there and sentenced to 

1 This was written in 1896, In 1902 it is very dififerent. The 
increase of all forms of perjur)' and false e\adence is universal. 



I02 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

two years' rigorous imprisonment. Shortly after- 
wards it was discovered that he was suspected of 
being concerned in a robbery in my jurisdiction, 
committed before his arrest. He was therefore 
transferred to the gaol near my court, and I inquired 
into the case, and committed him and four others 
for trial before the sessions judge for the robbery, 
which he admitted. 

Now, it so happened that immediately after I had 
passed orders in the case I was obliged to go out 
hurriedly into camp, leaving the necessary warrants 
to be signed in my absence by my junior magistrate, 
and a mistake occurred by which the committal- 
warrant was only made out for the four. The other 
man being already under sentence for two years, it 
was not considered necessary to make out a remand- 
warrant for him. But, as it happened, he had 
appealed from his former sentence and he was 
acquitted, so a warrant of release arrived at the gaol, 
and, in absence of any other warrant, he was at once 
released. 

Of course, on the mistake being discovered a 
fresh warrant was issued, and mounted police were 
sent over the country in search of him, without 
avail ; he could not be found. But some four days 
afterwards, in the late afternoon, as I was sitting 
in my house, just returned from court, my servant 
told me a man wanted to see me. He was shown 
up into the veranda, and, lo ! it was the very man 
I wanted. He had heard, he explained, that I 
wanted him, and had come to see me. I reminded 
him he was committed to stand his trial for dacoity, 
that was why I wanted him. He said that he 



viii CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 103 

thought all that was over, as he was released ; but 
I explained to him that the release only applied 
to the theft case. And then we walked over half 
a mile to court, I in front and he behind, across 
the wide plain, and he surrendered to the guard. 
He was tried and acquitted on this charge also. 
Not, as the sessions judge said later, that he had 
any doubt that my friend and the others were the 
right men, but because he considered some of the 
evidence unsatisfactory, and because the original 
confession was withdrawn. So he was released 
again, and went hence a free man. 

But think of him surrendering himself! He knew 
he had committed the dacoity with which he was 
charged : he himself had admitted it to begin with, 
and again admitted it freely when he knew he was 
safe from further trial. He knew he was liable to 
very heavy punishment, and yet he surrendered 
because he understood that I wanted him. I confess 
that I do not understand it at all, for this is no 
solitary instance. The circumstances, truly, were 
curious, but the spirit in which the man acted was 
usual enough. I have had dacoit leaders with prices 
on their heads walk into my camp. It was a common 
experience with many officers. The Burmans often 
act as children do. Their crimes are the violent, 
thoughtless crimes of children ; they are as little 
depraved by crime as children are. Who are more 
criminal than English boys ? and yet they grow up 
decent, law-abiding men. Almost the only confirmed 
criminals have been made so by punishment, by that 
punishment which some consider is intended to uplift 
them, but which never does aught but degrade them. 



I04 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Instead of cleansing the garment, it tears it, and 
renders it useless for this life. 

It is a very difficult question, this of crime and 
punishment. I have not written all this because 
I have any suggestion to make to improve it. I 
have not written it because I think that the laws 
of Manu, which obtained under the Burmese kings, 
and their methods of punishment, were any improve- 
ment on ours. On the contrary, I think they were 
much worse. Their laws and their methods of 
enforcing the law were those of a very young people. 
But, notwithstanding this, there was a spirit in their 
laws different from and superior to ours. 

I have been trying to see into the soul of this 
people whom I love so well, and nothing has struck 
me more than the way they regard crime and 
punishment ; nothing has seemed to me more worthy 
of note than their ideas of the meaning and end of 
punishment, of its scope and its limits. It is so very 
different from ours. As in our religion, so in our 
laws : /we believe in mercy at one time and in 
vengeance at another. We believe in vicarious 
punishment and vicarious salvation ; they believe in 
absolute justice — always the same, eternal and un- 
changeable as the laws of the stars. We purposely 
make punishment degrading ; they think it should 
be elevating, that in its purifying power lies its sole 
use and justification. We believe in tearing a soiled 
garment ; they think it ought to be washed./ 

Surely these are great differences, surely thoughts 
like these, engraven in the hearts of a young people, 
will lead, in the great and glorious future that lies 
before them, to a conception of justice, to a method 



viii CRIME AND PUNISHMENT 105 

of dealing with crime, very different from what we 
know ourselves. They are now very much as we 
were sixteen centuries ago, when the Romans ruled 
us. Now we are a greater people, our justice is 
better, our prisons are better, our morality is incon- 
ceivably better, than Imoerial Rome ever dreamt 
of. And so with these people, when their time 
shall come, when they shall have grown out of 
childhood into manhood, when they shall have the 
wisdom and strength and experience to put in force 
the convictions that are in their hearts, it seems 
to me that they will bring out of these convictions 
something more wonderful than we to-day have 
dreamt of. 



CHAPTER IX 

HAPPINESS 

' The thoughts of his heart, these are the wealth of a man.' 

Burmese saying. 

As I have said, there was this very remarkable 
fact in Burma — that when you left the king, you 
dropped at once to the villager. There were no 
intermediate, classes. There were no nobles, here- 
ditary officers, great landowners, wealthy bankers or 
merchants. 

Then there is no caste ; there are no gilds of 
trade, or art, or science. If a man discovered a 
method of working silver, say, he never hid it, 
but made it common property. It is very strange 
how absolutely devoid Burma is of the exclusiveness 
of caste so universal in India, and which survives 
to a great extent in Europe. The Burman is so 
absolutely enamoured of freedom, that he cannot 
abide the bonds which caste demands. He will 
not bind himself with other men for a slight 
temporal advantage ; he does not consider it worth 
the trouble. He prefers remaining free and poor to 
being bound and rich. Nothing is further from him 

io6 



CH. IX HAPPINESS 107 

than the feeling of exclusiveness. He abominates 
secrecy, mystery. His rehgion, his women, himself, 
are free ; there are no dark places in his life where 
the light cannot come. He is ready that every- 
thing should be known, that all men should be his 
brothers. 

And so all the people are on the same level. 
Richer and poorer there are, of course, but there 
are no very rich ; there is none so poor that he 
cannot get plenty to eat and drink. All eat much 
the same food, all dress much alike. The amuse- 
ments of all are the same, for entertainments are 
always free. So the Burman does not care to be 
rich. It is not in his nature to desire wealth, it is 
not in his nature to care to keep it when it comes 
to him. Beyond a sufficiency for his daily needs 
money has not much value. He does not care to 
add field to field or coin to coin ; the mere fact 
that he has money causes him no pleasure. Money 
is worth to him what it will buy. With us, when 
we have made a little money we keep it to be a 
nest-egg to make more from. Not so a Burman; 
he will spend it. And after his own little wants 
are satisfied, after he has bought himself a new silk, 
after he has given his wife a gold bangle, after he 
has called all his village together and entertained 
them with a dramatic entertainment — sometimes 
even before all this — he will spend the rest on 
charity. 

He will build a pagoda to the honour of the 
great teacher, where men may go to meditate on 
the great laws of existence. He will build a 
monastery school where the village lads are taught, 



io8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and where each villager retires some time in his 
life to learn the great wisdom. He will dig a well 
or build a bridge, or make a rest-house. And if 
the sum be very small indeed, then he will build, 
perhaps, a little house — a tiny little house — to hold 
two or three jars of water for travellers to drink. 
And he will keep the jars full of water, and put a 
little cocoanut-shell to act as cup. 

The amount spent thus every year in charity is 
enormous. The country is full of pagodas ; you 
see them on every peak, on every ridge along the 
river. They stand there as do the castles of the 
robber barons on the Rhine, only with what another 
meaning ! Near villages and towns there are 
clusters of them, great and small. The great pagoda 
in Rangoon is as tall as St. Paul's; I have seen 
many a one not three feet high — the offering of 
some poor old man to the Great Name, and every- 
where there are monasteries. Every village has 
one, at least ; most have two or three. A large 
village will have many. More would be built if 
there was anyone to live in them, so anxious is 
each man to do something for the monks. As it is, 
more are built than there is actual need for. 

There are rest-houses everywhere. Far away 
in the dense forests by the mountain-side you will 
find them, built in some little hollow by the road- 
side by someone who remembered his fellow-traveller. 
You cannot go five miles along any road without 
finding them. In villages they can be counted by 
tens, in towns by fifties. There are far more than 
are required. 

In Burmese times such roads and bridges as 






IX HAPPINESS 109 

were made were made in the same way by private 
charity. Nowadays, the British Government takes 
that in hand, and consequently there is probably 
more money for rest-house building than is required. 
As time goes on, the charity will flow into other 
lines, no doubt, in addition. They will build and 
endow hospitals, they will devote money to higher 
education, they will spend money in many ways, 
not in what we usually call charity, for that they 
already do, nor in m.issions, as whatever missions 
they may send out will cost nothing. Holy men 
are those vowed to extreme poverty. But as their 
civilization {their civilization, not any imposed from 
outside) progresses, they will find out new wants for 
the rich to supply, and they will supply them. That 
is a mere question of material progress. 

The inclination to charity is very strong. The 
Burmans give in charity far more in proportion to 
their wealth than any other people. It is extra- 
ordinary how much they give, and you must re- 
member that all of this is quite voluntary. With, 
I think, two or three exceptions, such as gilding the 
Shwe Dagon pagoda, collections are never made for 
any purpose. There is no committee of appeal, 
no organized collection. It is all given straight 
from the giver's heart. It is a very marvellous 
thing. 

I remember long ago, shortly after I had come 
to Burma, I was staying with a friend in Toungoo, 
and I went with him to the house of a Burman 
contractor. We had been out riding, and as we 
returned my friend said he wished to see the con- 
tractor about some business, and so we rode to his 




no THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

house. He came out and asked us in, and we dis- 
mounted and went up the stairs into the veranda, 
and sat down. It was a little house built of wood, 
with three rooms. Behind was a little kitchen and 
a stable. The whole may have cost a thousand 
rupees. As my friend and the Burman talked of 
their business, I observed the furniture. There was 
very little ; three or four chairs, two tables and a 
big box were all I could see. Inside, no doubt, 
were a few beds and more chairs. While we sat 
the wife and daughter came out and gave us 
cheroots, and I talked to them in my very limited 
Burmese till my friend was ready. Then we went 
away. 

That contractor, so my friend told me as we 
went home, made probably a profit of six or seven 
thousand rupees a year. He spent on himself about 
a thousand of this ; the rest went in charity. The 
great new monastery school, with the marvellous 
carved facade, just to the south of the town, was his, 
the new rest-house on the mountain road far up in 
the hills was his. He supported many monks, he 
gave largely to the gilding of the pagoda. If a 
theatrical company came that way, he subscribed 
freely. Soon he thought he would retire from con- 
tracting altogether, for he had enough to live on 
quietly for the rest of his life. 

His action is no exception, but the rule. You 
will find that every well-to-do man has built his 
pagoda or his monastery, and is called ' school- 
builder ' or * pagoda-builder.' These are the only 
titles the Burman knows, and they always are given 
most scrupulously. The builder of a bridge, a well, 



IX HAPPINESS 1 1 1 

or a rest-house may also receive the title of * well- 
builder,' and so on, but such titles are rarely used 
in common speech. Even the builder of a long 
shed for water-jars may call himself after it if he 
likes, but it is only big builders who receive any 
title from their fellows. But the satisfaction to the 
man himself, the knowledge that he has done a 
good deed, is much the same, I think. 

A Burman's wants are very few, such wants as 
money can supply — a little house, a sufficiency of 
plain food, a cotton dress for weekdays, and a silk 
one for holidays, and that is nearly all. 

You see, they are still a very young people. 
Many wants will come, perhaps, later on, but just 
now their desires are easily satisfied. 

The Burman does not care for a big house, for 
there are always the great trees and the open spaces 
by the village. It is far pleasanter to sit out of 
doors than indoors. He does not care for books. 
He has what is better than many books — the life 
of his people all about him, and he has the eyes to 
see it and the heart to understand it. He cares not 
to see with other men's eyes, but with his own ; 
he cares not to read other men's thoughts, but to 
think his own, for a love of books only comes to 
him who is shut always from the world by ill-health, 
by poverty, by circumstance. When we are poor 
and miserable, we like to read of those who are 
happier. When we are shut in towns, we love to 
read of the beauties of the hills. When we have no 
love in our hearts, we like to read of those who 
have. Few men who think their own thoughts care 
much to read the thoughts of others, for a man's 



\ 



112 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

own thoughts are worth more to him than all the 
thoughts of all the world besides. That a man 
should think, that is a great thing. No great 
thinkers are at the same time great readers. And 
he who can live his life, what cares he for reading 
of the lives of other people ? To have loved once 
is more than to have read all the poets that ever 
sang. So a Burman thinks. To see the moon rise 
on the river as you float along, while the boat rocks 
to and fro and someone talks to you, is not that 
better than any tale? 

So a Burman lives his life, and he asks a great 
deal from it. He wants fresh air and sunshine, and 
the great thoughts that come to you in the forest. 
He wants love and companionship, the voice of 
friends, the low laugh of women, the delight of 
children. He wants his life to be a full one, and 
he wants leisure to teach his heart to enjoy all these 
things ; for he knows that you must learn to enjoy 
yourself, that it does not always come naturally, 
that to be happy and good-natured and open- 
hearted requires an education. To learn to sympa- 
thize with your neighbours, to laugh with them and 
cry with them, you must not shut yourself away and 
work. His religion tells him that the first of all 
gifts is sympathy ; it is the first step towards 
wisdom, and he holds it true. After that, all shall 
be added to you. He believes that happiness is the 
first of all things. 

We think differently. We are content with 
cheerless days, with an absence of love, of beauty, 
of all that is valuable to the heart, if we can but put 
away a little money, if we can enlarge our business, 



IX HAPPINESS 113 

if we can make a bigger figure in the world. Nay, 
we go beyond this : we believe that work, that 
drudgery, is a beautiful thing in itself, that perpetual 
toil and effort is admirable. 

This we do because we do not know what to do 
with our leisure, because we do not know for what 
to seek, because we cannot enjoy. And so we go 
back to work, to feverish effort, because we cannot 
think, and see, and understand. ' Work is a means 
to leisure,' Aristotle told us long ago, and leisure, 
adds the Burman, is needed that you may compose 
your own soul. Work, no doubt, is a necessity, too, 
but not excess of it. 

The necessary thing to a man is not gold, nor 
position, nor power, but simply his own soul. 
Nothing is worth anything to him compared with 
that, for while a man lives, what is the good of all 
these things if he have no leisure to enjoy them ? 
And when he dies, shall they go down into the void 
with him ? No; but a man's own soul shall go with 
and be with him for ever. 

Like all men, a Burman's ideas of this world are 
dominated by his religion. His religion says to 
him, ' Consider your own soul, that is the main 
thing.' His religion says to him, ' The aim of every 
man should be happiness.' These are the funda- 
mental parts of his belief ; these he learns from his 
childhood : they are born in him. He looks at all 
the world by their light. Later on, when he grows 
older, his religion says to him, ' And happiness is 
only to be found by renouncing the whole world.' 
This is a hard teaching. This comes to him slowly, 
or all Buddhists would be monks ; but, meanwhile, 

I 



114 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

if he does but remember the first two precepts, he is 
on the right path. 

He does do this. Happiness is the aim he seeks. 
Work and power and money are but the means by 
which he will arrive at the leisure to teach his own 
soul. First the body, then the spirit ; but with us 
it is surely first the body, and then the body again. 

He often watches us with surprise. He sees us 
work and work and work ; he sees us grow old 
quickly, and our minds get weary ; he sees our 
sympathies grow very narrow, our ideas bent into 
one groove, our whole souls destroyed for a little 
money, a little fame, a little promotion, till we go 
home, and do not know what to do with ourselves, 
because we have no work and no sympathy with 
anything ; and at last we die, and take down with 
us our souls — souls fit for nothing but to be driven 
for ever with a goad behind and a golden fruit in 
front. 

But do not suppose that the Burmese are idle. 
Such a nation of workers was never known. Every 
man works, every woman works, every child works. 
Life is not an easy thing, but a hard, and there is 
a great deal of work to be done. There is not an 
idle man or woman in all Burma. The class of 
those who live on other men's labour is unknown. 
I do not think the Burman would care for such a 
life, for a certain amount of work is good, he knows. 
A little work he likes ; a good deal of work he does, 
because he is obliged often to do so to earn even 
the little he requires. And that is the end. H^e 
is a free man, never a slave to other men, nor to 
himself. 



IX HAPPINESS 115 

And so I do not think his will ever make what 
we call a great nation. He will never try to be 
a conqueror of other peoples, either with the sword, 
with trade, or with religion. He will never care to 
have a great voice in the management of the world. 
He does not care to interfere with other people : 
he never believes interference can do other than 
harm to both sides. 

He will never be very rich, very powerful, very 
advanced in science, perhaps not even in art, though 
I am not sure about that. It may be he will be 
very great in literature and art. But, however that 
may be, in his own idea his will be always the 
greatest nation in the world, because it is the 
happiest. 



CHAPTER X 

THE MONKHOOD 1 

* Let his life be kindness, his conduct righteousness ; then in the 
fulness of gladness he will make an end of grief.' — Dammapada. 

During his lifetime, that long lifetime that remained 
to him after he had found the light, Gaudama the 
Buddha gathered round him many disciples. They 
came to learn from his lips of that truth which he 
had found, and they remained near him to practise 
that life which alone can lead unto the Great Peace. 
And from time to time, as occasion arose, the 
teacher laid down precepts and rules to assist those 
who desired to live as he did — precepts and rules 
designed to help his disciples in the right way. 
Thus there arose about him a brotherhood of those 
who were striving to purify their souls, and lead the 
higher life, and that brotherhood has lasted ever 
since, till you see in it the monkhood of to-day, for 
that is all that the monks are — a brotherhood of 
men who are trying to live as their great master 
lived, to purify their souls from the lust of life, to 
travel the road that reaches unto deliverance. Only 
that, nothing more. 

ii6 



cH.x THE MONKHOOD 117 

There is no idea of priesthood about it at all, 
for by a priest we understand one who has received 
from above some power, who is, as it were, a repre- 
sentative on earth of God. Priests, to our thinking, 
are those who have delegated to them some of that 
authority of which God is the fountain-head. They 
can absolve from sin, we think ; they can accept 
into the faith ; they can eject from it ; they can 
exhort with authority ; they can administer the 
sacraments of religion ; they can speed the parting 
soul to God ; they can damn the parting soul to 
hell. A priest is one who is clothed with much 
authority and holiness. 

But in Buddhism there is not, there cannot be, 
anything of all this. The God who lies far beyond 
our ken has delegated His authority to no one. 
He works through everlasting laws. His will is 
manifested by unchangeable sequences. There is 
nothing hidden about His laws that requires exposi- 
tion by His agents, nor any ceremonies necessary 
for acceptance into the faith. Buddhism is a free 
religion. No one holds the keys of a man's salvation 
but himself Buddhism never dreams that anyone 
can save or damn you but yourself, and so a Buddhist 
monk is as far away from our ideas of a priest as 
can be. Nothing could be more abhorrent to 
Buddhism than any claim of authority, of power, 
from above, of holiness acquired except by the 
earnest effort of a man's own soul. 

These monks, who are so common all through 
Burma, whose monasteries are outside every village, 
who can be seen in every street in the early morning 
begging their bread, who educate the whole youth 



ii8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

of the country, are simply men who are striving 
after good. 

This is a difficult thing for us to understand, for 
our minds are bent in another direction. A religion 
without a priesthood seems to us an impossibility, 
and yet here it is so. The whole idea and thing of 
a priesthood would be repugnant to Buddhism. 

It is a wonderful thing to contemplate how this 
brotherhood has existed all these many centuries, 
how it has always gained the respect and admiration 
of the people, how it has always held in its hands the 
education of the children, and yet has never aspired 
to sacerdotalism. Think of the temptation resisted 
here. The temptation to interfere in government 
was great, the temptation to arrogate to themselves 
priestly powers is far, far greater. And yet it has 
been always resisted. This brotherhood of monks 
is to-day as it was twenty-three centuries ago — a 
community of men seeking for the truth. 

Therefore, in considering these monks, we must 
dismiss from our minds any idea of priesthood, any 
idea of extra - human sanctity, of extra - human 
authority. We must never liken them in any way 
to our priests, or even to our friars. I use the 
word monk, because it is the nearest of any English 
word I can find, but even that is not quite correct. 
I have often found this difficulty. I do not like to 
use the Burmese terms if I can help it, for this 
reason, that strange terms and names confuse us. 
They seem to lift us into another world — a world 
of people differing from us, not in habits alone, but 
in mind and soul. It is a dividing partition. It 
is very difficult to read a book speaking of people 



X THE MONKHOOD 119 

under strange terms, and feel that they are flesh and 
blood with us, and therefore I have, if possible, always 
used an English word where I can come anywhere 
near the meaning, and in this case I think monk 
comes closest to what I mean. Hermits they are 
not, for they live always in communities by villages, 
and they do not seclude themselves from human 
intercourse. Priests they are not, ministers they are 
not, clergymen they are not ; mendicants only half 
describes them, so I use the word monk as coming 
nearest to what I wish to say. 

The monks, then, are those who are trying to 
follow the teaching of Gaudama the Buddha, to 
wean themselves from the world, ' who have turned 
their eyes towards heaven, where is the lake in which 
all passions shall be washed away.' They are 
members of a great community, who are governed 
by stringent regulations — the regulations laid down 
in the Wini for observance by all monks. When a 
man enters the monkhood, he makes four vows — that 
he will be pure from lust, from desire of property, 
from the taking of any life, from the assumption of 
any supernatural powers. Consider this last, how it 
disposes once and for all of any desire a monk may 
have towards mysticism, for this is what he is taught : 

' No member of our community may ever arrogate 
to himself extraordinary gifts or supernatural per- 
fection, or through vainglory give himself out to be 
a holy man : such, for instance, as to withdraw into 
solitary places on pretence of enjoying ecstasies like 
the Ariahs, and afterwards to presume to teach 
others the way to uncommon spiritual attainments. 
Sooner may the lofty palm-tree that has been cut 



I20 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

down become green again, than an elect guilty of 
such pride be restored to his holy station. Take 
care for yourself that you do not give way to such 
an excess.' 

Is not this teaching the very reverse of that of 
all other peoples and religions ? Can you imagine 
the religious teachers of any other religion being 
warned to keep themselves free from visions? Are 
not visions and trances, dreams and imaginations, 
the very proof of holiness ? But here it is not so. 
These are vain things, foolish imaginations, and he 
who would lead the pure life must put behind him 
all such things as mere dram-drinking of the soul. 

This is a most wonderful thing, a religion that 
condemns all mysticisms. It stands alone here 
amongst all religions, pure from the tinsel of miracle, 
either past, or present, or to come. And yet this 
people is, like all young nations, given to supersti- 
tion : its young men dream dreams, its girls see 
visions. There are interpreters of dreams, many 
of them, soothsayers of all kinds, people who will 
give you charms, and foretell events for you. Just 
as it was with us not long ago, the mystery, what 
is beyond the world, exercises a curious fascination 
over them. Everywhere you will meet with traces 
of it, and I have in another chapter told some of 
the principal phases of these. But the religion has 
kept itself pure. No hysteric visions, no madman's 
dreams, no clever conjurer's tricks, have ever shed 
a tawdry glory on the monkhood of the Buddha. 
Amid all the superstition round about them they 
have remained pure, as they have from passion and 
desire. Here in the far East, the very home, we 



X THE MONKHOOD 121 

think, of the unnatural and superhuman, the very 
cradle of the mysterious and the wonderful, is a 
religion which condemns it all, and a monkhood 
who follow their religion. Does not this out-miracle 
any miracle ? 

With other faiths it is different : they hold out 
to those who follow their tenets and accept their 
ministry that in exchange for the worldly things 
which their followers renounce they shall receive 
other gifts, heavenly ones ; they will be endued with 
power from above ; they will have authority from 
on high ; they will become the chosen messengers 
of God ; they may even in their trances enter into 
His heaven, and see Him face to face. 

Buddhism has nothing of all this to offer. A 
man must surrender all the world, with no immediate 
gain. There is only this : that if he struggle along 
in the path of righteousness, he will at length attain 
unto the Great Peace. 

A monk who dreamed dreams, who said that 
the Buddha had appeared to him in a vision, who 
announced that he was able to prophesy, would be 
not exalted, but expelled. He would be deemed 
silly or mad ; think of that — mad — for seeing visions, 
not holy at all ! The boys would jeer at him ; he 
would be turned out of his monastery. 

A monk is he who observes purity and sanity 
of life. Hysteric dreams, the childishness of the 
mysterious, the insanity of the miraculous, are no 
part of that. 

And so a monk has to put behind him every- 
thing that is called good in this life, and govern 
his body and his soul in strict temperance. 



122 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

He must wear but yellow garments, ample and 
decent, but not beautiful ; he must shave his head ; 
he must have none but the most distant intercourse 
with women ; he must beg his food daily in the 
streets ; he must eat but twice, and then but a 
certain amount, and never after noon ; he must take 
no interest in worldly affairs ; he must own no 
property, must attend no plays or performances ; * he 
must eat, not to satisfy his appetite, but to keep his 
body alive ; he must wear clothes, not from vanity, 
but from decency ; he must live under a roof, not 
because of vainglory, but because the weather renders 
it necessary.' All his life is bounded by the very 
strictest poverty and purity. 

Yet there is no austerity. A monk may not 
over-eat, but he must eat enough ; he must not 
wear fine clothes, but he must be decent and com- 
fortable ; he must not have proud dwellings, but he 
should be sheltered from the weather. 

There is no self-punishment in Buddhism. Did 
not the Buddha prove the futility of this long ago ? 
The body must be kept in health, that the soul may 
not be hampered. And so the monks live a very 
healthy, very temperate life, eating and drinking 
just enough to keep the body in good health ; that 
is the first thing, that is the very beginning of the 
pure life. 

As he trains his body by careful treatment, so 
does he his soul. He must read the sacred books, 
he must meditate on the teachings of the great 
teacher, he must try by every means in his power 
to bring these truths home to himself, not as empty 
sayings, but as beliefs that are to be to him the very 



X THE MONKHOOD 123 

essence of all truth. He is not cut off from society. 
There are other monks, and there are visitors, men 
and women. He may talk to them — he is no recluse ; 
but he must not talk too much about worldly matters. 
He must be careful of his thoughts, that they do not 
lead him into wrong paths. His life is a life of self- 
culture. 

Being no priest, he has few duties to others to 
perform ; he is not called upon to interfere in the 
business of others. He does not visit the sick ; he 
has no concern with births and marriages and deaths. 
On Sunday, and on certain other occasions, he may 
read the laws to the people, that is all. Of this I 
will speak in another chapter. It does not amount 
to a great demand upon his time. He is also the 
schoolmaster of the village, but this is aside entirely 
from his sacred profession. Certain duties he has, 
however. Every morning as the earliest sunlight 
comes upon the monastery spires, when the birds 
are still calling to the day, and the cool freshness of 
the morning still lies along the highways, you will 
see from every monastery the little procession come 
forth. First, perhaps, there will be two schoolboys 
with a gong slung on a bamboo between them, which 
they strike now and then. And behind them, in 
their yellow robes, their faces cast upon the ground, 
and the begging-bowls in their hands, follow the 
monks. Very slowly they pass along the streets, 
amid the girls hurrying to their stalls in the bazaar 
with baskets of fruit upon their heads, the house- 
wives out to buy their day's requirements, the work- 
man going to his work, the children running and 
laughing and falling in the dust. Everyone makes 



124 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

room for them as they go in slow and solemn pro- 
cession, and from this house and that come forth 
women and children with a little rice that they have 
risen before daylight to cook, a little curry, a little 
fruit, to put into the bowls. Never is there any 
money given : a monk may not touch money, and 
his wants are very few. Presents of books, and so 
on, are made at other times ; but in the morning 
only food is given. 

The gifts are never acknowledged. The cover 
of the bowl is removed, and when the offering has 
been put in, it is replaced, and the monk moves on. 
And when they have made their accustomed round, 
they return, as they went, slowly to the monastery, 
their bowls full of food. I do not know that this 
food is always eaten by the monks. Frequently in 
large towns they are fed by rich men, who send 
daily a hot, fresh, well-cooked meal for each monk, 
and the collected alms are given to the poor, or to 
schoolboys, or to animals. But the begging round 
is never neglected, nor is it a form. It is a very 
real thing, as anyone who has seen them go knows. 
They must beg their food, and they do ; it is part 
of the self-discipline that the law says is necessary 
to help the soul to humility. And the people give 
because it is a good thing to give alms. Even if 
they know the monks are fed besides, they will fill 
the bowls as the monks pass along. If the monks 
do not want it, there are the poor, there are the 
schoolboys, sons of the poorest of the people, who 
may often be in need of a meal ; and if not, then 
there are the birds and the beasts. It is a good 
thing to givQ alms — good for yourself, I mean. So 



X THE MONKHOOD 125 

that this daily procession does good in two ways : 
it is good for the monk because he learns humility ; 
it is good for the people because they have thereby 
offered them a chance of giving a little alms. Even 
the poorest may be able to give his spoonful of rice. 
All is accepted. Think not a great gift is more 
acceptable than a little one. You must judge by 
the giver's heart. 

At every feast, every rejoicing, the central feature 
is presents to the monks. If a man put his son 
into a monastery, if he make merry at a stroke of 
good fortune, if he wish to celebrate a mark of 
favour from government, the principal ceremony of 
the feast will be presents to monks. They must be 
presents such as the monks can accept ; of course, 
that is understood. 

Therefore a man enters a monastery simply 
for this : to keep his body in health by perfect 
moderation and careful conduct, and to prepare 
his soul for heaven by meditation. That is the 
meaning of it all. 

If you see a grove of trees before you on your 
ride, mangoes and tamarinds in clusters, with palms 
nodding overhead, and great broad-leaved plantains 
and flowering shrubs below, you may be sure that 
there is a monastery, for it is one of the commands 
to the monks of the Buddha to live under the shade 
of lofty trees, and this command they always keep. 
They are most beautiful, many of these monasteries 
— great buildings of dark-brown teak, weather- 
stained, with two or three roofs one above the 
other, and at one end a spire tapering up until it 
ends in a gilded ' tee.' Many of the monasteries 



126 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

are covered with carving along the fagades and 
up the spires, scroll upon scroll of daintiest design, 
quaint groups of figures here and there, and on 
the gateways moulded dragons. All the carvings 
tell a story taken from the treasure-house of the 
nation's infancy, quaint tales of genii and fairy 
and wonderful adventure. Never, I think, do the 
carvings tell anything of the sacred life or teaching. 
The Burmese are not fond, as we are, of carving 
and painting scenes from sacred books. Perhaps 
they think the subject too holy for the hand of the 
craftsman, and so, with, as far as I know, but one 
exception in all Burma — a pagoda built by Indian 
architects long ago — you will look in vain for any 
sacred teaching in the carvings. But they are very 
beautiful, and their colour is so good, the deep rich 
brown of teak against the light green of the tama- 
rinds, and the great leaves of the plantains all about. 
Within the monastery it will be all bare. However 
beautiful the building is without, no relaxation of 
his rules is allowed to the monk within. All is 
bare : only a few mats, perhaps, here and there on 
the plank floor, a hard wooden bed, a box or two 
of books. 

At one end there will be sure to be the image 
of the teacher, wrought in alabaster. These are 
always one of three stereotyped designs ; they are 
not works of art at all. The wealth of imagination 
and desire of beauty that finds its expression in 
the carved stories in the fagades has no place here 
at all. It would be thought a sacrilege to attempt 
in any way to alter the time-honoured figures that 
have come down to us from long ago. 



X THE MONKHOOD 127 

Over the head of the image there will be a white 
umbrella, whence we have derived our haloes, and 
perhaps a lotus blossom in an earthen pot in front. 
That will be all. There is this very remarkable 
fact : of all the great names associated with the 
life of the Buddha, you never see any presentment 
at all. 

The Buddha stands alone. Of Maya his mother, 
of Yathodaya his wife, of Rahoula his son, of his 
great disciple Thariputra, of his dearest disciple 
and brother Ananda, you see nothing. There are 
no saints in Buddhism at all, only the great teacher, 
he who saw the light. Surely this is a curious 
thing, that from the time of the prince to now, 
two thousand four hundred years, no one has arisen 
to be worthy of mention of record beside him. 
There is only one man holy to Buddhism — 
Gaudama the Buddha. 

On one side of the monasteries there will be 
many pagodas, tombs of the Buddha. They are 
usually solid cones, topped with a gilded 'tee,' and 
there are many of them. Each man will build one 
in his lifetime if he can. They are always white. 

And so there is much colour about a monastery — 
the brown of the wood and the white of the pagoda, 
and tender green of the trees. The ground is 
always kept clean-swept and beaten and neat. And 
there is plenty of sound, too — the fairy music of 
little bells upon the pagoda -tops when the breeze 
moves, the cooing of the pigeons in the eaves, the 
voices of the schoolboys. Monastery land is sacred. 
No life may be taken there, no loud sounds, no noisy 
merriment, no abuse is permitted anywhere within 



128 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

the fence. Monasteries are places of meditation and 
peace. 

Of course, all monasteries are not great and 
beautiful buildings ; many are but huts of bamboo 
and straw, but little better than the villager's hut. 
Some villages are so poor that they can afford but 
little for their holy men. But always there will be 
trees, always the ground will be swept, always the 
place will be respected just the same. And as soon 
as a good crop gives the village a little money, it 
will build a teak monastery, be sure of that. 

Monasteries are free to all. Any stranger may 
walk into a monastery and receive shelter. The 
monks are always hospitable. I have myself lived, 
perhaps, a quarter of my life in Burma in monasteries, 
or in the rest-houses attached to them. We break 
all their laws : we ride and wear boots within the 
sacred enclosure ; our servants kill fowls for our 
dinners there, where all life is protected ; we treat 
these monks, these who are the honoured of the 
nation, much in the offhand, unceremonious way 
that we treat all Orientals ; we often openly laugh 
at their religion. And yet they always receive 
us ; they are often even glad to see us and talk to 
us. Very, very seldom do you meet with any 
return in kind for your contempt of their faith and 
habits. I have heard it said sometimes that some 
monks stand aloof, that they like to keep to them- 
selves. If they should do so, can you wonder .'* 
Would any people, not firmly bound by their 
religion, put up with it all for a moment ? If you 
went into a Mahommedan mosque in Delhi with 
your boots on, you would probably be killed. Yet 



X THE MONKHOOD 129 

we clump round the Shwe Dagon pagoda at our 
ease, and no one interferes. Do not suppose that 
it is because the Burman believes less than the 
Hindu or Mahommedan. It is because he believes 
more, because he is taught that submission and 
patience are strong Buddhist virtues, and that a 
man's conduct is an affair of his own soul. He is 
willing to believe that the Englishman's breaches 
of decorum are due to foreign manners, to the 
necessities of our life, to ignorance. But even if 
he supposed that we did these things out of sheer 
wantonness, it would make no difference. If the 
foreigner is dead to every feeling of respect, of 
courtesy, of sympathy, that is an affair of the 
foreigner's own heart. It is not for the monk to 
enforce upon strangers the respect and reverence 
due to purity, to courage, to the better things. 
Each man is responsible for himself, the foreigner 
no less than the Burman. If a foreigner have no 
respect for what is good, that is his own business. 
It can hurt no one but himself if he is blatant, 
ignorant, contemptuous. No one is insulted by 
it, or requires revenge for it. You might as well 
try and insult gravity by jeering at Newton and 
his pupils, as injure the laws of righteousness by 
jeering at the Buddha or his monks. And so you 
will see foreigners take all sorts of liberties in monas- 
teries and pagodas, break every rule wantonly, 
and disregard everything the Buddhist holds holy, 
and yet very little notice will be taken openly. 
Burmans will have their own opinion of you, do 
have their own opinion of you, without a doubt ; 
but because you are lost to all sense of decency, 

K 



130 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

that is no reason why the Buddhist monk or layman 
should also lower himself by getting angry and 
resent it ; and so you may walk into any monastery 
or rest-house and act as you think fit, and no one 
will interfere with you. Nay, if you even show a 
little courtesy to the monks, your hosts, they will 
be glad to talk to you and tell you of their lives 
and their desires. It is very seldom that a pleasant 
word or a jest will not bring the monks into for- 
getting all your offences, and talking to you freely 
and openly. I have had, I have still, many friends 
among the monkhood ; I have been beholden to 
them for many kindnesses ; I have found them 
always, peasants as they are, courteous and well- 
mannered. Nay, there are greater things than 
these. 

When my dear friend was murdered at the out- 
break of the war, wantonly murdered by the soldiers 
of a brutal official, and his body drifted down the 
river, everyone afraid to bury it, for fear of the 
wrath of government, was it not at last tenderly 
and lovingly buried by the monks near whose 
monastery it floated ashore ? Would all people 
have done this ? Remember, he was one of those 
whose army was engaged in subduing the kingdom ; 
whose army imprisoned the king, and had killed, 
and were killing, many, many hundreds of Burmans. 
* We do not remember such things. All men are 
brothers to the dead.' They are brothers to the 
living, too. Is there not a great monastery near 
Kindat, built by an Englishman as a memorial to 
the monk who saved his life at peril of his own at 
th^t same time, who preserved him till help came? 



X THE MONKHOOD 131 

Can anyone ever tell when the influence of a 
monk has been other than for pity or mercy? 
Surely they believe their religion ? I did not know- 
how people could believe till I saw them. 

Martyrdom — what is martyrdom, what is death, 
for your religion, compared to living within its 
commands ? Death is easy ; life it is that is difficult. 
Men have died for many things : love and hate, and 
religion and science, for patriotism and avarice, for 
self-conceit and sheer vanity, for all sorts of things, 
of value and of no value. Death proves nothing. 
Even a coward can die well. But a pure life is the 
outcome only of the purest religion, of the greatest 
belief, of the most magnificent courage. Those 
who can live like this can die, too, if need be — have 
done so often and often ; that is but a little matter 
indeed. No Buddhist would consider that as a very 
great thing beside a holy life. 

There is another difference between us. We 
think a good death hallows an evil life ; no Buddhist 
would hear of this for a moment. 

The reverence in which a monk — ay, even the 
monk to-day who was but an ordinary man yester- 
day — is held by the people is very great. All those 
who address him do so kneeling. Even the king 
himself was lower than a monk, took a lower seat 
than a monk in the palace. He is addressed as 
' Lord,' and those who address him are his disciples. 
Poor as he is, living on daily charity, without any 
power or authority of any kind, the greatest in the 
land would dismount and yield the road that he 
should pass. Such is the people's reverence for 
a holy life. Never was such voluntary homage 



132 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

yielded to any as to these monks. There is a 
special language for them, the ordinary language 
of life being too low to be applied to their actions. 
They do not sleep or eat or walk as do other men. 

It seems strange to us, coming from our land 
where poverty is an offence, where the receipt of 
alms is a degradation, where the ideal is power, to 
see here all this reversed. The monks are the 
poorest of the poor, they are dependent on the 
people for their daily bread ; for although lands may 
be given to a monastery — as a matter of fact, very 
few have any at all, and those only a few palm- 
trees — they have no power at all, either temporal or 
eternal ; they are not very learned, and yet they are 
the most honoured of all people. Without any of 
the attributes which in our experience gather the 
love and honour of mankind, they are honoured 
above all men. 

The Burman demands from the monk no assist- 
ance in heavenly affairs, no interference in worldly, 
only this, that he should live as becomes a follower 
of the great teacher. And because he does so live 
the Burman reverences him beyond all others. The 
king is feared, the wise man admired, perhaps envied, 
the rich man is respected, but the monk is honoured 
and loved. There is no one beside him in the heart 
of the people. If you would know what a Burman 
would be, see what a monk is : that is his ideal. 
But it is a very difficult ideal. The Burman is very 
fond of life, very full of life, delighting in the joy of 
existence, brimming over with vitality, with humour, 
with merriment. They are a young people, in the 
full flush of early nationhood. To them of all 



X THE MONKHOOD 133 

people the restraints of a monk's life must be terrible 
and hard to maintain. And because it is so, because 
they all know how hard it is to do right, and 
because the monks do right, they honour them, and 
they know they deserve honour. Remember that 
all these people have been monks themselves at 
one time or other ; they know how hard the rules 
are, they know how well they are observed. They 
are reverencing what they thoroughly understand ; 
they have seen the monkhood from the inside ; 
their reverence is the outcome of a very real 
knowledge. 

Of the internal management of the monkhood 
I have but little to say. There is the Thathana- 
baing, who is the head of the community ; there are 
under him Gaing-oks, who each have charge of a 
district ; each Gaing-ok has an assistant, a ' prop,' 
called Gaing-dauk ; and there are the heads of monas- 
teries. The Thathanabaing is chosen by the heads 
of the monasteries, and appoints his Gaing-oks and 
Gaing-dauks. There is no complication about it. 
Usually any serious dispute is decided by a court of 
three or four heads of monasteries, presided over by 
the Gaing-ok. But note this: no monk can be tried 
by any ecclesiastical court without his consent. Each 
monastery is self-governing ; no monk can be called 
to account by any Gaing-ok or Gaing-dauk unless 
he consent. The discipline is voluntary entirely. 
There are no punishments by law for disobedience 
of an ecclesiastical court. A monk cannot be un- 
frocked by his fellows. 

Therefore, it would seem that there would be no 
check over abuses, that monks could do as they liked, 



134 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

that irregularities could creep in, and that, in fact, 
there is nothing to prevent a monastery becoming a 
disgrace. This would be a great mistake. It must 
never be forgotten that monks are dependent on 
their village for everything — food and clothes, and 
even the monastery itself. Do not imagine that the 
villagers would allow their monks, their ' great 
glories,' to become a scandal to them. The super- 
vision exercised by the people over their monks is 
most stringent. As long as the monks act as 
monks should, they are held in great honour, they 
are addressed by titles of great respect, they are 
supplied with all they want within the rules of the 
Wini, they are the glory of the village. But do you 
think a Burman would render this homage to a 
monk whom he could not respect, who did actions 
he should not ? A monk is one who acts as a 
monk. Directly he breaks his laws, his holiness is 
gone. The villagers will have none such as he. They 
will hunt him out of the village, they will refuse him 
food, they will make him a byword, a scorn. I have 
known this to happen. If a monk's holiness be 
suspected, he must clear himself before a court, or 
leave that place quickly, lest worse befall him. It 
is impossible to conceive any supervision more close 
than this of the people over their monks, and so the 
breaches of any law by the monks are very rare — 
very rare indeed. You see, for one thing, that a 
monk never takes the vows for life. He takes them 
for six months, a year, two years, very often for five 
years ; then, if he finds the life suit him, he continues. 
If he finds that he cannot live up to the standard 
required, he is free to go. There is no compulsion 



X THE MONKHOOD 135 

to stay, no stigma on going. As a matter of fact, 
very few monks there are but have left the monas- 
tery at one time or another. It is impossible to 
over-estimate the value of this safety valve. What 
with the certainty of detection and punishment from 
his people, and the knowledge that he can leave the 
monastery if he will at the end of his time without 
any reproach, a monk is almost always able to keep 
within his rules. 

I have had for ten years a considerable experience 
of criminal law. I have tried hundreds of men for 
all sorts of offences ; I have known of many hundreds 
more being tried, and the only cases where a monk 
was concerned that I can remember are these : three 
times a monk has been connected in a rebellion, 
once in a divorce case, once in another offence. 
This last case happened just as we annexed the 
country, and when our courts were not established. 
He was detected by the villagers, stripped of his 
robes, beaten, and hunted out of the place with 
every ignominy possible. There is only one opinion 
amongst all those who have tried to study the 
Buddhist monkhood — that their conduct is admir- 
able. Do you suppose the people would reverence 
it as they do if it were corrupt ? They know : they 
have seen it from the inside. It is not outside 
knowledge they have. And when it is understood 
that anyone can enter a monastery — thieves and 
robbers, murderers and sinners of every description, 
can enter, are even urged to enter monasteries, and 
try to live the holy life ; and many of them do, 
either as a refuge against pursuit, or because they 
really repent — it will be conceded that the discipline 



136 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

of the monks, if obtained in a different way to else- 
where, is very effective. 

The more you study the monkhood, the more 
you see that this community is the outcome of the 
very heart of the people. It is a part of the people, 
not cut off from them, but of them ; it is recruited 
in great numbers from all sorts and conditions of 
men. In every village and town — nearly every 
man [has been a monk at one time or another — it 
is honoured alike by all ; it is kept in the straight 
way, not only from the inherent righteousness of its 
teaching, but from the determination of the people 
to allow no stain to rest upon what they consider as 
their * great glory.' This whole monkhood is 
founded on freedom. It is held together not by a 
strong organization, but by general consent. There 
IS no mystery about it, there are no dark places here 
where the sunlight of inquiry may not come. The 
whole business is so simple that the very children 
can and do understand it. I shall have expressed 
myself very badly if I have not made it understood 
how absolutely voluntary this monkhood is, held 
together by no everlasting vows, restrained by no 
rigid discipline. It is simply the free outcome of 
the free beliefs of the people, as much a part of 
them as the fruit is of the tree. You could no more 
imagine grapes without a vine than a Buddhist 
monkhood that did not spring directly from, and 
depend entirely on, the people. It is the higher 
expression of their life. 

In writing this account of the Burmese and their 
religion, I have tried always to see with my own 



X THE MONKHOOD 137 

eyes, to write my own thoughts without any 
reference to what anyone else may have thought or 
written. I have believed that whatever value may 
attach to any man's opinions consists in the fact 
that they are his opinions, and not a rechauffe of the 
thoughts of others, and therefore I have not even 
referred to, or quoted from, any other writer, prefer- 
ring to write only what I have myself seen and 
thought. But I cannot end this chapter on the 
monks of the Buddha without a reference to what 
Bishop Bigandet has said on the same subject, for 
he is no observer prejudiced in favour of Buddhism, 
but the reverse. He was a bishop of the Church of 
Rome, believing always that his faith contained all 
truth, and that the Buddha was but a ' pretended 
saviour,' his teachings based on 'capital and revolting 
errors,' and marked with an ' inexplicable and deplor- 
able eccentricity.' Bishop Bigandet was in no sympathy 
with Buddhism, but its avowed foe, desirous of under- 
mining and destroying its influence over the hearts of 
men, and yet this is the way he ends his chapter : 

* There is in that religious body — the monks — a 
latent principle of vitality that keeps it up and com- 
municates to it an amount of strength and energy 
that has hitherto maintained it in the midst of wars, 
revolutionary and political, convulsions of all descrip- 
tions. Whether supported or not by the ruling 
power, it has remained always firm and unchanged. 
It is impossible to account satisfactorily for such a 
phenomenon, unless we find a clear and evident 
cause of such extraordinary vitality, a cause inde- 
pendent of ordinary occurrences of time and circum- 
stances, a cause deeply rooted in the very soul of 



138 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. x 

the populations that exhibit before the observer this 
great and striking reHgious feature. 

' That cause appears to be the strong religious 
sentiment, the firm faith, that pervades the mass of 
Buddhists. The laity admire and venerate the 
religious, and voluntarily and cheerfully contribute 
to their maintenance and welfare. From its ranks 
the religious body is constantly recruited. There is 
hardly a man that has not been a member of the 
fraternity for a certain period of time. 

* Surely such a general and continued impulse 
could not last long unless it were maintained by a 
powerful religious connection. 

* The members of the order preserve, at least 
exteriorly, the decorum of their profession. The 
rules and regulations are tolerably well observed ; 
the grades of hierarchy are maintained with scru- 
pulous exactitude. The life of the religious is one 
of restraint and perpetual control. He is denied all 
sorts of pleasures and diversions. How could such 
a system of self-denial ever be maintained, were it 
not for the belief which the Rahans have in the 
merits that they amass by following a course of life 
which, after all, is repugnant to Nature ? It cannot 
be denied that human motives often influence both 
the laity and the religious, but, divested of faith and 
the sentiments supplied by even a false belief, their 
action could not produce in a lasting and persevering 
manner the extraordinary and striking fact that we 
witness in Buddhist countries.' 

This monkhood is the proof of how the people 
believe. Has any religion ever had for twenty-four 
centuries such a proof as this ? 



CHAPTER XI 

THE MONKHOOD — H 

' The restrained in hand, restrained in foot, restrained in speech, of 
the greatest self-control. He whose delight is inward, who is tranquil 
and happy when alone — him they call *' mendicant." ' — Acceptance into 
the Monkhood, 

Besides being the ideal of the Buddhists, the monk 
is more : he is the schoolmaster of all the boys. It 
must be remembered that this is a thing aside from 
his monkhood. A monk need not necessarily teach ; 
the aim and object of the monkhood is, as I have 
written in the last chapter, purity and abstraction 
from the world. If the monk acts as schoolmaster, 
that is a thing apart. And yet all monasteries are 
schools. The word in Burmese is the same ; they 
are identified in popular speech and in popular 
opinion. All the monasteries are full of scholars, 
all the monks teach. I suppose much the same 
reasons have had influence here as in other nations : 
the desire of the parents that their children should 
learn religion in their childhood, the fact that the 
wisest and most honoured men entered the monk- 
hood, the leisure of the monks giving them oppor- 
tunity for such occupation. 

139 



HO THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Every man all through Burma has gone to a 
monastery school as a lad, has lived there with the 
monks, has learnt from them the elements of educa- 
tion and a knowledge of his faith. It is an exception 
to find a Burman who cannot read and write. Some- 
times from lack of practice the art is lost in later 
manhood, but it has always been acquired. The 
education is not very deep — reading Burmese and 
writing; simple, very simple, arithmetic; a knowledge 
of the days and months, and a little geography, 
perhaps, and history — that is all. But of their 
religion they learn a great deal. They have to get 
by heart great portions of the sacred books, stories 
and teachings, and they have to learn many prayers. 
They have to recite them, too, as those who have 
lived much near monasteries know. Several times 
a day, at about nine o'clock at night, and again 
before dawn, you will hear the lads intoning clearly 
and loudly some of the sacred teachings. I have 
been awakened many a time in the early morning, 
before the dawn, before even the promise of the 
dawn in the eastern sky, by the children's voices 
intoning. And I have put aside my curtain and 
looked out from my rest-house and seen them in 
the dim starlight kneeling before the pagoda, the 
tomb of the great teacher, saying his laws. The 
light comes rapidly in this country: the sky reddens, 
the stars die quickly overhead, the first long beams 
of sunrise are trembling on the dewy bamboo feathers 
ere they have finished. It is one of the most beauti- 
ful sights imaginable to see monks and children 
kneeling on the bare ground, singing while the dawn 
comes. 



XI THE MONKHOOD 141 

The education In their religion is very good, very 
thorough, not only in precept, but in practice ; for in 
the monastery you must live a holy life, as the monks 
live, even if you are but a schoolboy. 

But the secular education is limited. It is up to 
the standard of education amongst the people at 
large, but that is saying little. Beyond reading and 
writing and arithmetic it does not go. I have seen 
the little boys do arithmetic. They were adding 
sums, and they began, not as we would, on the 
right, but on the left. They added, say, the 
hundreds first ; then they wrote on the slate the 
number of hundreds, and added up the tens. If 
it happened that the tens mounted up so as to add 
one or more to the hundreds, a little grimy finger 
would wipe out the hundreds already written and 
write in the correct numbers. It follows that if the 
units on being added up came to over ten, the tens 
must be corrected with the little grimy finger, first 
put in the mouth. Perhaps both tens and hundreds 
had to be written again. It will be seen that when 
you come to thousands and tens of thousands, a 
good deal of wiping out and re -writing may be 
required. A Burman is very bad at arithmetic ; 
a villager will often write i 33 as 100,303 ; he would 
almost as soon write 43 as 34 ; both figures are in 
each number, you see. 

I never met a Burman who had any idea of cubic 
measurement, though land measurement they pick 
up very quickly. 

I have said that the education in the monasteries 
is up to the average education of the people. That 
is so now. Whether when civilization progresses 



342 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and more education is required the monasteries will 
be able to provide it, is another thing. 

The education given now is mostly a means 
to an end : to learning the precepts of religion. 
Whether the monks will provide an education 
beyond such a want, I doubt. You see, a monk 
is by his vows, by the whole tenour of his life, 
apart from the world ; too keen a search after 
knowledge, any kind of secular knowledge, would 
be a return to the things of this life, would, perhaps, 
re-kindle in him the desires that the whole meaning 
of his life is to annihilate. 'And after thou hast run 
over all things, what will it profit thee if thou hast 
neglected thyself?' 

Besides, no knowledge, except mere theoretical 
knowledge, can be acquired without going about in 
the world. You cannot cut yourself off from the 
world and get knowledge of it. Yet the monk is 
apart from the world. It is true that Buddhism has 
no antagonism to science— nay, has every sympathy 
with, every attraction to, science. Buddhism will 
never try and block the progress of the truth, of 
light, secular or religious ; but whether the monks 
will find it within their vows to provide that science, 
only time can prove. However it may be, it will 
not make any difference to the estimation in which 
the monks are held. They are not honoured for 
their wisdom — they often have but little ; nor for 
their learning — they often have none at all ; nor 
for their industry — they are never industrious ; but 
because they are men trying to live — nay, succeed- 
ing in living — a life void of sin. Up till now the 
education given by the monks has met the wants 



/ 



XI THE MONKHOOD 143 

of the people ; in future it will do so less and 
less. But a community that has lived through 
twenty centuries of change, and is now of the 
strength and vitality that the Buddhist monkhood 
is, can have nothing to fear from any such change. 
Schoolmasters, except religious and elementary, 
they may cease to be, perhaps ; the pattern and 
ensample of purity and righteousness they will 
always remain. 



CHAPTER XII 

PRAYER 

*What is there that can justify tears and lamentations?' 

Saying of the Buddha. 

Down below my house, in a grove of palms near 
the river, was a little rest-house. It was but a roof 
and a floor of teak boarding without any walls, and 
it was plainly built. It might have held, perhaps, 
twenty people ; and here, as I strolled past in the 
evening when the sun was setting, I would see two 
or three old men sitting with beads in their hands. 
They were making their devotions, saying to them- 
selves that the world was all trouble, all weariness, 
and that there was no rest anywhere except in 
observing the laws of righteousness. It was very 
pathetic, I thought, to see them there, saying this 
over and over again, as they told their beads 
through their withered fingers, for surely there was 
no necessity for them to learn it. Has not every- 
one learnt it, this, the first truth of Buddhism, long 
before his hair is gray, before his hands are shaking, 
before his teeth are gone ? But there they would 
sit, evening after evening, thinking of the change 

144 



CH. XII PRAYER 145 

about to come upon them soon, realizing the empti- 
ness of life, wishing for the Great Peace. 

On Sundays the rest-house, like many others 
round the village, was crowded. Old men there 
would be, and one or two young men, a few 
children, and many women. Early in the morning 
they would come, and a monk would come down 
from the monastery near by, and each one would 
vow, with the monk as witness, that he or she would 
spend the day in meditation and in holy thought, 
would banish all thought of evil, and be for the day 
at least holy. And then, the vow made, the devotee 
would go and sit in the rest-house and meditate. 
The village is not very near ; the sounds come very 
softly through the trees, not enough to disturb the 
mind ; only there is the sigh of the wind wandering 
amid the leaves, and the occasional cry of birds. 
Once before noon a meal will be eaten, either food 
brought with them cold, or a simple pot of rice 
boiled beside the rest-house, and there they will 
stay till the sun sets and darkness is gathering 
about the foot of the trees. There is no service 
at all. The monk may come and read part of the 
sacred books — some of the Abidama, or a sermon 
from the Thoots — and perhaps sometimes he may 
expound a little ; that is all. There is nothing akin 
to our ideas of worship. For consider what our 
service consists of: there is thanksgiving and praise, 
there is prayer, there is reading of the Bible, there is 
a sermon. Our thanksgiving and praise is rendered 
to God for things He has done, the pleasure that 
He has allowed us to enjoy, the punishment that 
He might have inflicted upon us and has not. Our 

L 



146 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

prayer is to Him to preserve us in future, to assist 
us in our troubles, to give us our daily food, not to 
be too severe upon us, not to punish us as we 
deserve, but to be merciful and kind. We ask 
Him to protect us from our enemies, not to allow 
them to triumph over us, but to give us triumph 
over them. 

But the Buddhist has far other thoughts than 
these. He believes that the world is ruled by ever- 
lasting, unchangeable laws of righteousness. The 
great God lives far behind His laws, and they are 
for ever and ever. You cannot change the laws of 
righteousness by praising them, or by crying against 
them, any more than you can change the revolution 
of the earth. Sin begets sorrow, sorrow is the only 
purifier from sin ; these are eternal sequences ; they 
cannot be altered ; it would not be good that they 
should be altered. The Buddhist believes that the 
sequences are founded on righteousness, are the path 
to righteousness, and he does not believe he could 
alter them for the better, even if he had the power 
by prayer to do so. He believes in the everlasting 
righteousness^ that all things work for good in the 
end ; he has no need for prayer or praise ; he thinks 
that the world is governed with far greater wisdom 
than any of his — perfect wisdom, that is too great, 
too wonderful, for his petty praise. 

God lives far behind His laws ; think not He has 
made them so badly as to require continual rectifica- 
tion at the prayer of man. Think not that God is 
not bound by His own laws. The Buddhist will 
never believe that God can break His own laws ; 
that He is like an earthly king who imagines one 



XII PRAYER 147 

code of morality for his subjects and another for 
himself. Not so ; the great laws are founded in 
righteousness, so the Buddhist believes, in ever- 
lasting righteousness ; they are perfect, far beyond 
our comprehension ; they are the eternal, unchange- 
able, marvellous will of God, and it is our duty not 
to be for ever fretfully trying to change them, but to 
be trying to understand them. That is the Buddhist 
belief in the meaning of religion, and in the laws of 
righteousness ; that is, he believes the duty of him 
who would follow religion to be to try to under- 
stand these laws, to bring them home to the heart, 
so to order life as to bring it into harmony with 
righteousness. 

Now see the difference. We believe that the 
world is governed not by eternal laws, but by a 
changeable and continually changing God, and that 
it is our duty to try and persuade Him to make it 
better. 

We believe, really, that we know a great deal 
better than God what is good, not only for us, but 
for others ; we do not believe His will is always 
righteous — not at all : God has wrath to be depre- 
cated ; He has mercy to be aroused ; He has 
partiality to be turned towards us, and hence our 
prayers. 

But to the Buddhist the whole world is ruled by 
righteousness, the same for all, the same for ever, 
and the only sin is ignorance of these laws. 

The Buddha is he who has found for us the light 
to see these laws, and to order our life in accordance 
with them. 

So it will be understood, I think, why there is no 



148 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

prayer, no gathering together for any ceremonial, in 
Buddhism ; why there is no praise, no thanksgiving 
of any kind ; why it is so very different in this way 
from our faith. Buddhism is a wisdom, a seeking 
of the light, a following of the light, each man as 
best he can, and it has very little to correspond 
with our prayer, our services of praise, our meetings 
together in the name of Christ. 

Therefore, when you see a man kneeling before a 
pagoda, moving silent lips of prayer, when you see 
the people sitting quietly in the rest-houses on a 
Sunday, when you see the old men telling their 
beads to themselves slowly and sadly, when you 
hear the resonant chant of monks and children, 
lending a soul to the silence of the gloaming, you 
will know what they are doing. They are trying 
to understand and bring home to themselves the 
eternal laws of righteousness ; they are honouring 
their great teacher. 

This is all that there is ; this is the meaning of 
all that you see and hear. The Buddhist praises 
and honours the Buddha, the Indian prince who so 
long ago went out into the wilderness to search for 
truth, and after many years found it in his own 
heart ; he reverences the Buddha for seeing the light ; 
he thanks the Buddha for his toil and exertion in 
making this light known to all men. It can do the 
Buddha no good, all this praise, for he has come to 
his eternal peace ; but it can arouse the enthusiasm 
of the follower, can bring into his heart love for the 
memory of the great teacher, and a firm resolve to 
follow his teaching. 

The service of his religion is to try and follow 



XII PRAYER 149 

these laws, to take them home into the heart, that 
the follower, too, may come soon into the Great 
Peace. 

This has been called a pessimism. Surely it is 
the greatest optimism the world has known — this 
certainty that the world is ruled by righteousness, 
that the world has been, that the world will always 
be, ruled by perfect righteousness. 

To the Buddhist this is a certainty. The laws 
are laws of righteousness, if man would but see, 
would but understand. Do not complain and cry 
and pray, but open your eyes and see. The light is 
all about you, if you would only cast the bandage 
from your eyes and look. It is so wonderful, so 
beautiful, far beyond what any man has dreamt of, 
has prayed for, and it is for ever and for ever. 

This is the attitude of Buddhism towards prayer, 
towards thanksgiving. It considers them an im- 
pertinence and a foolishness, born of ignorance, 
akin to the action of him who would daily desire 
Atlas not to allow the heavens to drop upon the 
earth. 

The world is ruled by laws, and these laws are 
laws of righteousness. 

And yet, and yet. 

I remember standing once on the platform of a 
famous pagoda, the golden spire rising before us, 
and carved shrines around us, and seeing a woman 
lying there, her face to the pagoda. She was pray- 
ing fervently, so fervently that her words could be 
heard, for she had no care for anyone about, in such 
trouble was she ; and what she was asking was this, 
that her child, her baby, might not die. She held 



I50 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

the little thing in her arms, and as she looked upon 
it her eyes were full of tears. For it was very sick ; 
its little limbs were but thin bones, with big knees 
and elbows, and its face was very wan. It could 
not even take any interest in the wonderful sights 
around, but hardly opened its careworn eyes now 
and then to blink upon the world. 

* Let him recover, let him be well once more ! ' 
the woman cried, again and again. 

Whom was she beseeching? I do not know. 

* Thakin, there will be Someone, Someone. A 
Spirit may hear. Who can tell ? Surely someone 
will help me? Men would help me if they could, 
but they cannot ; surely there will be someone ? ' 

So she did not remember the story of Ma Pa Da. 

Women often pray, I think — they pray that their 
husbands and those they love may be well. It is 
a frequent ending to a girl's letter to her lover: 
' And I pray always that you may be well' I 
never heard of their praying for anything but this : 
that they may be loved, and those they love may 
be well. Nothing else is worth praying for besides 
this. The queen would pray at the pagoda in 
the palace morning and evening. ' What did she 
pray for ? ' ' What should she pray for, thakin ? 
Surely she prayed that her husband might be true 
to her, and that her children might live and be 
strong. That is what women pray for. Do you 
think a queen would pray differently to any other 
woman ? ' 

* Women,' say the Buddhist monks, * never under- 
stand. They will not understand ; they cannot 
learn. And so we say that most women must be 



xii PRAYER 151 

born again, as men, before they can see the light 
and understand the laws of righteousness.' 

What do women care for laws of righteousness ? 
What do they care for justice ? What for the ever- 
lasting sequences that govern the world ? Would 
not they involve all other men, all earth and heaven, 
in bottomless chaos, to save one heart they loved ? 
That is woman's religion. 



CHAPTER XIII 



FESTIVALS 



' The law is sweet, filling the soul with joy.' 

Saying of the Buddha. 

The three months of the rains, from the full moon 
of July to the full moon of October, is the Buddhist 
Lent. It was during these months that the Buddha 
would retire to some monastery and cease from 
travelling and teaching for a time. The custom 
was far older even than that — so old that we do 
not know how it arose. Its origin is lost in the 
mists of far-away time. But whatever the beginning 
may have been, it fits in very well with the habits 
of the people ; for in the rains travelling is not easy. 
The roads are very bad, covered even with water, 
often deep in mud ; and the rest-houses, with open 
sides, are not very comfortable with the rain drifting 
in. Even if there were no custom of Lent, there 
would be but little travelling then. People would 
stay at home, both because of the discomfort of 
moving, and because there is much work then at 
the village. For this is the time to plough, this is 
the time to sow ; on the villagers' exertions in these 

152 



CH. XIII FESTIVALS 153 

months depends all their maintenance for the rest 
of the year. Every man, every woman, every child, 
has hard work of some kind or another. 

And so, what with the difficulties of travelling, 
what with the work there is to do, and what with 
the custom of Lent, everyone stays at home. It is 
the time for prayer, for fasting, for improving the 
soul. Many men during these months will live even 
as the monks live, will eat but before mid-day, will 
abstain from tobacco. There are no plays during 
Lent, and there are no marriages. It is the time 
for preparing the land for the crop ; it is the time 
for preparing the soul for eternity. The congrega- 
tions on the Sundays will be far greater at this time 
than at any other ; there will be more thought of 
the serious things of life. 

It is a very long Lent — three months ; but with 
the full moon of October comes the end. The rains 
then are over ; the great black bank of clouds that 
walled up all the south so long is gone. The south 
wind has died away, and the light, fresh north wind 
is coming down the river. The roads are drying up, 
the work in the fields is over for a time, awaiting 
the ripening of the grain. The damp has gone out 
of the air, and it is very clear. You can see once 
more the purple mountains that you have missed so 
long ; there is a new feeling in the wind, a laughter 
in the sunshine, a flush of blossom along the fields 
like the awakening of a new joy. The rains are 
over and the cool weather is coming ; Lent is over 
and gladness is returned ; the crop has been sown, 
and soon will come the reaping. And so at this 
full moon of October is the great feast of the 



154 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

year. There are other festivals : of the New Year, 
in March, with its water -throwing ; of each great 
pagoda at its appointed time ; but of all, the festival 
of the end of Lent is the greatest. 

Wherever there are great pagodas the people will 
come in from far and near for the feast. There are 
many great pagodas in Burma ; there is the Arakan 
pagoda in Mandalay, and there was the Incompar- 
able pagoda, which has been burnt ; there are great 
pagodas at Pegu, at Prome, at many other places ; 
but perhaps the greatest of all is the Shwe Dagon 
at Rangoon. 

You see it from far away as you come up the 
river, steaming in from the open sea, a great tongue 
of flame before you. It stands on a small conical 
hill just behind the city of Rangoon, about two miles 
away from the wharves and shipping in the busy 
river. The hill has been levelled on the top and 
paved into a wide platform, to which you ascend by 
a flight of many steps from the gate below, where 
stand the dragons. This entrance-way is all roofed 
over, and the pillars and the ceiling are red and 
painted. Here it was that much fighting took place 
in the early wars, in 1852 especially, and many men, 
English and Burmese, were killed in storming and 
defending this strong place. For it had been made 
a very strong place, this holy place of him who 
taught that peace was the only good, and the de- 
fences round about it are standing still. Upon the 
top of this hill, the flat paved top, stands the pagoda, 
a great solid tapering cone over three hundred feet 
high, ending in an iron fretwork spire that glitters 
with gold and jewels ; and the whole pagoda is 



xiii FESTIVALS 155 

covered with gold — pure leaf-gold. Down below it 
is being always renewed by the pious offerings of 
those who come to pray and spread a little gold- 
leaf on it ; but every now and then it is all regilt, 
from the top, far away above you, to the golden 
lions that guard its base. It is a most wonderful 
sight, this great golden cone, in that marvellous 
sunlight that bathes its sides like a golden sea. It 
seems to shake and tremble in the light like a fire. 
And all about the platform, edging it ere it falls 
away below, are little shrines, marvels of carven 
woodwork and red lacquer. They have tapering 
roofs, one above another, till they, too, end in ai 
golden spire full of little bells with tongues. And 
as the wind blows the tongues move to and fro, and 
the air is full of music, so faint, so clear, like ' silver 
stir of strings in hollow shells.' 

In most of these shrines there are statues of the 
great teacher, cut in white alabaster, glimmering 
whitely in the lustrous shadows there within ; and in 
one shrine is the great bell. Long ago we tried to 
take this great bell ; we tried to send it home as a 
war trophy, this bell stolen from their sacred place, 
but we failed. As it was being put on board a ship, 
it slipped and fell into the river into the mud, where 
the fierce tides are ever coming and going. And 
when all the efforts of our engineers to raise it had 
failed, the Burmese asked : * The bell, our bell, is 
there in the water. You cannot get it up. You 
have tried and you have failed. If we can get it 
up, may we have it back to hang in our pagoda as 
our own again ? ' And they were told, with a laugh, 
perhaps, that they might ; and so they raised it up 



156 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

again, the river giving back to them what it had 
refused to us, and they took and hung it where it 
used to be. There it is now, and you may hear it 
when you go, giving out a long, deep note, the beat 
of the pagoda's heart. 

There are many trees, too, about the pagoda 
platform — so many, that seen far off you can only 
see the trees and the pagoda towering above them. 
Have not trees been always sacred things ? Have 
not all religions been glad to give their fanes the 
glory and majesty of great trees ? 

You may look from the pagoda platform over the 
whole country, over the city and the river and the 
straight streets ; and on the other side you may see 
the long white lakes and little hills covered with 
trees. It is a very beautiful place, this pagoda, and it 
is steeped in an odour of holiness, the perfume of the 
thousand thousand prayers that have been prayed 
there, of the thousand thousand holy thoughts that 
have been thought there. 

The pagoda platform is always full of people 
kneeling, saying over and over the great precepts 
of their faith, trying to bring into their hearts the 
meaning of the teaching of him of whom this 
wonderful pagoda represents the tomb. There are 
always monks there passing to and fro, or standing 
leaning on the pillars of the shrines ; there are 
always a crowd of people climbing up and down 
the long steps that lead from the road below. It is 
a place I always go to when I am in Rangoon ; 
for, besides its beauty, there are the people ; and if 
you go and stand near where the stairway reaches 
the platform you will see the people come up. 



XIII FESTIVALS 157 

They come up singly, in twos, in groups. First a 
nun, perhaps, walking very softly, clad in her white 
dress with her beads about her neck, and there in 
a corner by a little shrine she will spread a cloth 
upon the hard stones and kneel and bow her face 
to the great pagoda. And then she v/ill repeat, 
' Sorrow, misery, trouble,' over and over again, 
running her beads through her fingers, repeating 
the words in the hope that in the end she may 
understand whither they should lead her. ' Sorrow, 
misery, trouble ' — ah ! surely she must know what 
they mean, or she would not be a nun. And then 
comes a young man, and after a reverence to the 
pagoda he goes wandering round, looking for some- 
one, maybe ; and then comes an old man with his 
son. They stop at the little stalls on the stairs, and 
they have bought there each a candle. The old 
man has a plain taper, but the little lad must have 
one with his emblem on it. Each day has its own 
sign, a tiger for Monday, and so on, and the lad 
buys a candle like a little rat, for his birthday is 
Friday, and the father and son go on to the plat- 
form. And there they kneel down side by side, the 
old man and the little chubby lad, and they, too, say 
that all is misery and delusion. And then they rise 
and advance to the pagoda's golden base, and put 
their candles thereon and light them. This side of 
the pagoda is in shadow now, and so you can see 
the lights of the candles as little stars. 

And then come three girls, sisters, perhaps, all 
so prettily dressed, with meek eyes, and they, too, 
buy candles ; they, too, kneel and say their prayers, 
for long, so long, that you wonder if anything has 



158 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

happened, if there has been any trouble that has 
brought them thus in the sunset to the remembrance 
of religion. But at last they rise, and they light 
their little candles near by where the old man and 
the boy have lit theirs, and then they go away. 
They are so sad, they keep their faces so turned 
upon the ground, that you fear there has been some- 
thing, some trouble come upon them. You feel so 
sorry for them, you would like to ask them what it 
all is ; you would like to help them if you could. 
But you can do nothing. They go away down the 
steps, and you hear the nun repeating always, 
' Sorrow, misery, trouble.' 

So they come and go. 

But on the festival days at the end of Lent it is 
far more wonderful. Then for units there are tens, 
for tens there are hundreds — all come to do reverence 
to the great teacher at this his great holy place. 
There is no especial ceremony, no great service, 
such as we are accustomed to on our festivals. 
Only there will be many offerings ; there will be a 
procession, maybe, with offerings to the pagoda, 
with offerings to the monks ; there will be much 
gold-leaf spread upon the pagoda sides ; there will 
be many people kneeling there — that is all. For 
Buddhism is not an affair of a community, but of 
each man's own heart. 

To see the great pagoda on the festi^l days is 
one of the sights of the world. There are a great 
crowd of people coming and going, climbing up the 
steps. There are all sorts of people, rich and poor, 
old and young. Old men there are, climbing wearily 
up these steps that are so steep, steps that lead 



XIII FESTIVALS 159 

towards the Great Peace ; and there are old women, 
too — many of them. 

Young men will be there, walking briskly up, 
laughing and talking to each other, very happy, 
very merry, glad to see each other, to see so many 
people, calling pleasant greetings to their friends as 
they pass. They are all so gaily dressed, with 
beautiful silks and white jackets and gay satin 
head-clothes, tied with a little end sticking up as 
a plume. 

And the girls, how shall I describe them ? — so 
sweet they are, so pretty in their fresh dresses, with 
downcast eyes of modesty, tempered with little side- 
glances. They laugh, too, as they go, and they 
talk, never forgetting the sacredness of the place, 
never forgetting the reverences due, kneeling always 
first as they come up to the great pagoda, but being 
of good courage, happy and contented. There are 
children, too, numbers and numbers of them, walking 
along, with their little hands clasping so tightly some 
bigger ones, very fearful lest they should be lost. 
They are as gay as butterflies in their dress, but 
their looks are very solemn. There is no solemnity 
like that of a little child ; it takes all the world so 
very seriously, walking along with great eyes of 
wonder at all it sees about it. 

They are all well dressed who come here ; on 
a festival day even the poor can be dressed well. 
Pinks and reds are the prevailing colours, in checks, 
in stripes, mixed usually with white. These colours 
go best with their brown skins, and they are fondest 
of them. But there are other colours, too : there 
is silver and green embroidery, and there are shot- 



i6o THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

silks in purple and orange, and there is dark blue. 
All the jackets, or nearly all the jackets, are white 
with wide sleeves, showing the arm nearly up to the 
elbow. Each man has his turban very gay, while 
each girl has a bright handkerchief which she drapes 
as she likes upon her arm, or carries in her hand. 
Such a blaze of colour would not look well with us. 
Under our dull skies and with our sober lights it 
would be too bright ; but here it is not so. Every- 
thing is tempered by the sun ; it is so brilliant, this 
sunlight, such a golden flood pouring down and 
bathing the whole world, that these colours are only 
in keeping. And before them is the gold pagoda, 
and about them the red lacquer and dark-brown 
carving of the shrines. 

You hear voices like the murmur of a summer 
sea, rising and falling, full of laughter low and sweet, 
and above is the music of the fairy bells. 

Everything is in keeping — the shining pagoda 
and the gaily-dressed people, their voices and the 
bells, even the great bell far beyond, and all are so 
happy. 

The feast lasts for seven days ; but of these there 
are three that are greater, and of these, one, the day 
of the full moon, is the greatest of all. On that 
day the offerings will be most numerous, the crowd 
densest. Down below the pagoda are many tem- 
porary stalls built, where you can buy all sorts of 
fairings, from a baby's jointed doll to a new silk 
dress ; and there are restaurants where you may 
obtain refreshments ; for the pagoda is some way 
from the streets of the city, and on festival days 
refreshments are much wanted. 



XIII FESTIVALS i6i 

These stalls are always crowded with people 
buying and selling, or looking anxiously at the 
many pretty wares, unable, perhaps, to buy. The 
refreshments are usually very simple — rice and curry 
for supper, and for little refreshments between whiles 
there are sugar-cakes and vermicelli, and other little 
cakes. 

The crowd going up and down the steps is like 
a gorgeous-coloured flood, crested with white foam, 
flowing between the dragons of the gate ; and on 
the platform the crowd is thicker than ever. All 
day the festival goes on — the praying, the offering 
of gifts, the burning of little candles before the 
shrines — until the sun sets across the open country 
far beyond in gold and crimson glory. But even 
then there is no pause, no darkness, for hardly has 
the sun's last bright shaft faded from the pagoda 
spire far above, while his streamers are still bright 
across the west, than there comes in the east a 
new radiance, so soft, so wonderful, it seems more 
beautiful than the dying day. Across the misty 
fields the moon is rising ; first a crimson globe hung 
low among the trees, but rising fast, and as it rises 
growing whiter. Its light comes flooding down 
upon the earth, pure silver with very black shadows. 
Then the night breeze begins to blow, very softly, 
very gently, and the trees give out their odour to 
the night, which woos them so much more sweetly 
than the day, till all the air is heavy with incense. 

Behold, the pagoda has started into a new glory, 
for it is all hung about with little lamps, myriads of 
tiny cressets, and the fagades of the shrines are lit 
up, too. The lamps are put in long rows or in 

M 



1 62 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

circles, to fit the places they adorn. They are little 
earthenware jars full of cocoanut oil, with a lip 
where is the wick. They burn very redly, and 
throw a red light about the platform, breaking the 
shadows that the moonlight throws and staining its 
whiteness. 

In the streets, too, there are lamps — the houses 
are lined with them — and there are little pagodas 
and ships designed in flame. 

All the people come out to see the illuminations, 
just as they do with us at Christmas to see the shop- 
windows, and the streets are crowded with people 
going to and fro, laughing and talking. And there 
are dramatic entertainments going on, dances and 
marionette shows, all in the open air. The people 
are all so happy, they take their pleasure so plea- 
santly, that it is a delight to see them. You can- 
not help but be happy, too. The men joke and 
laugh, and you laugh, too; the children smile at 
you as they pass, and you must smile, too ; can you 
help it ? And to see the girls makes the heart glad 
within you. There is an infection from the good 
temper and the gaiety about you that is irresistible, 
even if you should want to resist it. 

The festival goes on till very late. The moon is 
so bright that you forget how late it is, and only 
remember how beautiful is all around. You are 
very loath to leave it, and so it is not till the moon 
itself is falling low down in the same path whither 
the sun went before her, it is not till the lamps are 
dying one by one and the children are yawning 
very sleepily, that the crowd disperses and the 
pagoda is at rest. 



XIII FESTIVALS 163 

Such is a great feast at a great pagoda. 

But whenever I think of a great feast, whenever 
the growing autumn moon tells me that the end 
of Lent is drawing nigh, it is not the great feast 
of the Shwe Dagon, nor of any other famous 
pagoda that comes into my mind, but something 
far different. 

It was on a frontier long ago that there was 
the festival that I remember so well. The country 
there was very far away from all the big towns ; 
the people were not civilized as those of Mandalay 
or of Rangoon ; the pagoda was a very small one. 
There was no gilding upon it at all, and no shrines 
were about it ; it stood alone, just a little white 
plastered pagoda, with a few trees near it, on a bare 
rice-field. There were a few villages about, dotted 
here and there in the swamp, and the people of 
these were all that came to our festival. 

For long before the villagers were preparing for 
it, saving a little money here, doing a little extra 
work there, so that they might be able to have 
presents ready for the monks, so that they might be 
able to subscribe to the lights, so that they would 
have a good dress in which they might appear. 

The men did a little more work at the fields, 
bamboo-cutting in the forest, making baskets in the 
evening, and the women wove. All had to work 
very hard to have even a little margin ; for there, 
although food — plain rice — was very cheap, all other 
things were very expensive. It was so far to bring 
them, and the roads were so bad. I remember that 
the only European things to be bought there then 
were matches and tinned milk, and copper money 



1 64 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

was not known. You paid a rupee, and took the 
change in rice or other commodities. 

The excitement of the great day of the full moon 
began in the morning, about ten o'clock, with the 
offerings to the monks. Outside the village gate 
there was a piece of straight road, dry and open, 
and on each side of this, in rows, were the people 
with their gifts ; mostly they were eatables. You 
see that it is very difficult to find any variety of 
things to give a monk ; he is very strictly limited 
in the things he is allowed to receive. Garments, 
yellow garments, curtains to partition off corners of 
the monasteries and keep away the draughts, sacred 
books and eatables — that is nearly all. But eatables 
allow a very wide range. A monk may accept and 
eat any food — not drink, of course — provided he 
eat but the one big meal a day before noon ; and 
so most of the offerings were eatables. Each donor 
knelt there upon the road with his or her offerings 
in a tray in front. There was rice cooked in all 
sorts of shapes, ordinary rice for eating with curry, 
and the sweet purple rice, cooked in bamboos and 
coming out in sticks. There were vegetables, too, 
of very many kinds, and sugar and cakes and oil 
and honey, and many other such things. There 
were a few, very few, books, for they are very hard 
to get, being all in manuscript ; and there were one 
or two tapestry curtains ; but there were heaps of 
flowers. I remember there was one girl whose 
whole offering was a few orchid sprays, and a little, 
very little, heap of common rice. She was so poor ; 
her father and mother were dead, and she was not 
married. It was all she could give. She sat behind 



XIII FESTIVALS 165 

her little offering, as did all the donors. And my 
gift? Well, although an English official, I was not 
then very much richer than the people about me, so 
my gift must be small, too — a tin of biscuits, a tin 
or two of jam, a new pair of scissors. I did not sit 
behind them myself, but gave them to the headman 
to put with his offerings ; for the monk3 were old 
friends of mine. Did I not live in one of their 
monasteries for over two months when we first 
came and camped there with a cavalry squadron ? 
And if there is any merit in such little charity, as 
the Burmese say there is, why should I not gain it, 
too ? The monks said my present was best of all, 
because it was so uncommon ; and the biscuits, they 
said, though they did not taste of much while you 
were eating them, had a very pleasant after -taste 
that lasted a long time. They were like charity, 
maybe : that has a pleasant after-taste, too, they 
tell me. 

When all the presents, with the donors behind 
them, dressed all in their best, were ready, the 
monks came. There were four monasteries near 
by, and the monks, perhaps in all thirty, old and 
young, monks and novices, came in one long pro- 
cession, walking very slowly, with downcast eyes, 
between the rows of gifts and givers. They did 
not look at them at all. It is not proper for a 
monk to notice the gifts he receives ; but school- 
boys who came along behind attending on them, 
they saw and made remarks. Perhaps they saw 
the chance of some overflow of these good things 
coming their way. * See,' one nudged the other ; 
* honey — what a lot ! I can smell it, can't you ? ' 



i66 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

And, ' My mother ! what a lot of sweet rice ! Who 
gave that ? Oh, I see old U Hman.' * I wonder 
what's in that tin box ? ' remarked one as he passed 
my biscuits. ' I hope it's coming to our monastery, 
any way.' 

Thus the monks passed, paying no sort of atten- 
tion, while the people knelt to them ; and when the 
procession reached the end of the line of offerings, 
it went on without stopping, across the fields, the 
monks of each monastery going to their own place ; 
and the givers of presents rose up and followed 
them, each carrying his or her gifts. And so they 
went across the fields till each little procession was 
lost to sight. 

That was all the ceremony for the day, but at 
dusk the illuminations began. The little pagoda in 
the fields was lighted up nearly to its top with con- 
centric rings of lamps till it blazed like a pyramid 
of flame, seen far across the night. All the people 
came there, and placed little offerings of flowers at 
the foot of the pagoda, or added each his candle to 
the big illumination. 

The house of the headman of the village was lit 
up with a few rows of lamps, and all the monasteries, 
too, were lit. There were no restaurants — every- 
one was at home, you see— but there were one or 
two little stalls, at which you could buy a cheroot, 
or even perhaps a cup of vermicelli ; and there was 
a dance. It was only the village girls who had 
been taught, partly by their own mothers, partly by 
an old man, who knew something of the business. 
They did not dance very well, perhaps ; they were 
none of them very beautiful ; but what matter ? 



XIII FESTIVALS 167 

We knew them all ; they were our neighbours, the 
kinswomen of half the village ; everyone liked to 
see them dance, to hear them sing ; they were all 
young, and are not all young girls pretty ? And 
amongst the audience were there not the girls' 
relations, their sisters, their lovers ? would not that 
alone make the girls dance well, make the audience 
enthusiastic ? And so, what with the illuminations, 
and the chat and laughter of friends, and the dance, 
we kept it up till very late ; and we all went to bed 
happy and well pleased with each other, well pleased 
with ourselves. Can you imagine a more successful 
end than that? 

To write about these festivals is so pleasant, it 
brings back so many delightful memories, that I 
could go on writing for long and long. But there 
is no use in doing so, as they are all very much 
alike, with little local differences depending on the 
enterprise of the inhabitants and the situation of the 
place. There might be boat-races, perhaps, on a 
festival day, or pony-races, or boxing. I have seen 
all these, if not at the festival at the end of Lent, 
at other festivals. I remember once I was going 
up the river on a festival night by the full moon, 
and we saw point after point crowned with lights 
upon the pagodas ; and as we came near the great 
city we saw a new glory ; for there was a boat 
anchored in mid-stream, and from this boat there 
dropped a stream of fire ; myriads of little lamps 
burned on tiny rafts that drifted down the river in 
a golden band. There were every now and then 
bigger rafts, with figures made in light — boats and 
pagodas and monasteries. The lights heaved with 



i68 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xiii 

the long swell of the great river, and bent to and 
fro like a great sna;ke following the tides, until at 
length they died far away into the night. 

I do not know what is the meaning of all these 
lights ; I do not know that they have any inner 
meaning, only that the people are very glad, only 
that they greatly honour the great teacher who died 
so long ago, only that they are very fond of light 
and colour and laughter and all beautiful things. 

But although these festivals often become also 
fairs, although they are the great centres for amuse- 
ment, although the people look to them as their 
great pleasure of the year, it must not be forgotten 
that they are essentially religious feasts, holy days. 
Though there be no great ceremony of prayer, or 
of thanksgiving, no public joining in any religious 
ceremony, save, perhaps, the giving of alms to the 
monks, yet religion is the heart and soul of them. 
Their centre is the pagoda, their meaning is a 
religious meaning. 

What if the people make merry, too, if they make 
their holy days into holidays, is that any harm ? 
For their pleasures are very simple, very innocent ; 
there is nothing that the moon, even the cold and 
distant moon, would blush to look upon. The 
people make merry because they are merry, because 
their religion is to them a very beautiful thing, not 
to be shunned or feared, but to be exalted to the 
eye of day, to be rejoiced in. 



CHAPTER XIV 



WOMEN- 



* Her cheek is more beautiful than the dawn, her eyes are deeper 
than the river pools ; when she loosens her hair upon her shoulders, 
it is as night coming over the hills.' — Burmese Love- Song. 

If you were to ask a Burman, ' What is the position 
of women in Burma ? ' he would reply that he did 
not know what you meant. Women have no 
position, no fixed relation towards men beyond 
that fixed by the fact that women are women and 
men .are men. They differ a great deal in many 
ways, so a Burman would say ; men are better in 
some things, women are better in others ; if they 
have a position, their relative superiority in certain 
things determines it. How else should it be 
determined ? 

If you say by religion, he laughs, and asks what 
religion has to do with such things ? Religion is a 
culture of the soul ; it is not concerned with the 
relationship of men and women. If you say by 
law, he says that law has no more to do with it 
than religion. In the eye of the law both are alike. 
*You wouldn't have one law for a man and another 
for a woman ? ' he asks. 

169 



170 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

In the life of the Buddha nothing is said upon 
the subject. The great teacher never committed 
himself to an opinion as to whether men or women 
were the highest. He had men disciples, he had 
women disciples ; he honoured both. Nowhere in 
any of his sayings can anything be found to show 
that he made any difference between them. That 
monks should be careful and avoid intercourse with 
women is merely the counterpart of the order that 
nuns should be careful in their intercourse with men. 
That man's greatest attraction is woman does not 
infer wickedness in woman ; that woman's greatest 
attraction is man does not show that man is a devil. 
Wickedness is a thing of your own heart. If he 
could be sure that his desire towards women was 
dead, a monk might see them as much as he liked. 
The desire is the enemy, not the woman ; therefore 
a woman is not damned because by her man is 
often tempted to evil ; therefore a woman is not 
praised because by her a man may be led to better 
thoughts. She is but the outer and unconscious 
influence. 

If, for instance, you cannot see a precipice 
without wishing to throw yourself down, you blame 
not the precipice, but your giddiness ; and if you 
are wise you avoid precipices in future. You do 
not rail against steep places because you have 
a bad circulation. So it is with women : you 
should not contemn women because they rouse a 
devil in man. 

And it is the same with man. Men and women 
are alike subject to the eternal laws. And they 
are alike subject to the laws of man ; in no material 



XIV WOMEN 171 

points, hardly even in minor points, does the law 
discriminate against women. 

The law as regards marriage and inheritance 
and divorce will come each in its own place. It 
is very much the same both for the man and the 
woman. 

The criminal law was the same for both ; I have 
tried to find any difference, and this is all I have 
found : A woman's life was less valuable than a 
man's. The price of the body, as it is called, of a 
woman was less than that of a man. If a woman 
were accidentally killed, less compensation had to 
be paid than for a man. I asked a Burman about 
this once. 

' Why is this difference ? ' I said. ' Why does the 
law discriminate ? ' 

' It isn't the law,' he said, ' it is a fact. A woman 
is worth less than a man in that way. A maid- 
servant can be hired for less than a manservant, a 
daughter can claim less than a son. They cannot 
do so much work ; they are not so strong. If they 
had been worth more, the law would have been the 
other way ; of course they are worth less.' 

And so this sole discrimination is a fact, not 
dogma. It is a fact, no doubt, everywhere. No one 
would deny it. The pecuniary Value of a woman is 
less than that of a man. As to the soul's value, 
that is not a question of law, which confines itself to 
material affairs. But I suppose all laws have been 
framed out of the necessities of mankind. It was 
the incessant fighting during the times when our 
laws grew slowly into shape, the necessity of not 
allowing the possession of land, and the armed 



172 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

wealth that land gave, to fall into the weaker hands 
of women, that led to our laws of inheritance. 

Laws then were governed by the necessity of war, 
of subjecting everything else to the ability to fight. 
Consequently, as women were not such good fighters 
as men, they went to the wall. But feudalism never 
obtained at all in Burma. What fighting they did 
was far less severe than that of our ancestors, was 
not the dominant factor in the position, and conse- 
quently woman did not suffer. 

She has thus been given the inestimable boon of 
freedom. Freedom from sacerdotal dogma, from 
secular law, she has always had. 

And so, in order to preserve the life of the people, 
it has never been necessary to pass laws treating 
woman unfairly as regards inheritance ; and as 
religion has left her free to find her own position, so 
has the law of the land. 

And yet the Burman man has a confirmed opinion 
that he is better than a woman, that men are on the 
whole superior as a sex to women. * We may be 
inferior in some ways,' he will tell you. * A woman 
may steal a march on us here and there, but in the 
long-run the man will always win. Women have no 
patience.' 

I have heard this said over and over again, even 
by women, that they have less patience than a man. 
We have often supposed differently. Some Burmans 
have even supposed that a woman must be reincar- 
nated as a man to gain a step in holiness. I do not 
mean that they think men are always better than 
women, but that the best men are far better than the 
best women, and there are many more of them. 



XIV WOMEN 173 

However all this may be, it is only an opinion. Neither 
in their law, nor in their religion, nor — what is far 
more important — in their daily life, do they acknow- 
ledge any inferiority in women beyond those patent 
weaknesses of body that are, perhaps, more differences 
than inferiorities. 

She has always had fair-play, from religion, from 
law, and from her fellow man and woman. 

She has been bound by no ties, she has had per- 
fect freedom to make for herself just such a life as 
she thinks best fitted for her. She has had no frozen 
ideals of a long dead past held up to her as eternal 
copies. She has been allowed to change as her 
world changed, and she has lived in a very real world 
— a world of stern facts, not fancies. You see, she 
has had to fight her own way ; for the same laws 
that made woman lower than man in Europe com- 
pensated her to a certain extent by protection and 
guidance. In Burma she has been neither confined 
nor guided. In Europe and India for very long the 
idea was to make woman a hot-house plant, to see 
that no rough winds struck her, that no injuries 
overtook her. In Burma she has had to look out 
for herself : she has had freedom to come to grief as 
well as to come to strength. All such laws cut both 
ways. Freedom to do ill must accompany freedom 
to do well. You cannot have one without the other. 
The Burmese woman has had both. Ideals act for 
good as well as for evil ; if they cramp all progress, 
they nevertheless tend to the sustentation of a 
certain level of thought. She has had none. What- 
ever she is, she has made herself, finding under the 
varying circumstances of life what is the best for 



174 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

her ; and as her surroundings change, so will she. 
What she was a thousand years ago I do not care, 
what she may be a thousand years hence I do not 
know ; it is of what she is to-day that I have tried 
to know and write. 

Children in Burma have, I think, a very good 
time when they are young. Parentage in Burma 
has never degenerated into a sort of slavery. It 
has never been supposed that gaiety and goodness 
are opposed. And so they grow up little merry 
naked things, sprawling in the dust of the gardens, 
sleeping in the sun with their arms round the village 
dogs, very sedate, very humorous, very rarely crying. 
Boys and girls when they are babies grow up 
together, but with the schooldays comes a division. 
All the boys go to school at the monastery without 
the walls, and there learn in noisy fashion their 
arithmetic, letters, and other useful knowledge. But 
little girls have nowhere to go. They cannot go to 
the monasteries, these are for boys alone, and the 
nunneries are very scarce. For twenty monasteries 
there is not one nunnery. Women do not seem to 
care to learn to become nuns as men do to become 
monks. Why this is so I cannot tell, but there is no 
doubt of the fact. And so there are no schools for 
girls as there are for boys, and consequently the girls 
are not well educated as a rule. In great towns 
there are, of course, regular schools for girls, gener- 
ally for girls and boys together ; but in the villages 
these very seldom exist. The girls may learn from 
their mothers how to read and write, but most of 
them cannot do so. It is an exception in country 
places to find a girl who can read, as it is to find 



XIV WOMEN 175 

a boy who cannot. If there were more nunneries, 
there would be more education among the women ; 
here is cause and effect. But there are not, so the 
little girls work instead. While their brothers are in 
the monasteries, the girls are learning to weave and 
herd cattle, drawing water, and collecting firewood. 
They begin very young at this work, but it is very 
light ; they are never overworked, and so it does 
them no harm usually, but good. 

The daughters of better - class people, such as 
merchants, and clerks, and advocates, do not, of 
course, work at field labour. They usually learn to 
read and write at home, and they weave, and many 
will draw water. For to draw water is to go to the 
well, and the well is the great meeting-place of the 
village. As they fill their jars they lean over the 
curb and talk, and it is here that is told the latest 
news, the latest flirtation, the little scandal of the 
place. Very few men or boys come for water ; 
carrying is not their duty, and there is a proper 
place for flirtation. So the girls have the well 
almost to themselves. 

Almost every girl can weave. In many houses 
there are looms where the girls weave their dresses 
and those of their parents ; and many girls have 
stalls in the tazaar. Of this I will speak later. 
Other duties are the husking of rice and the making 
of cheroots. Of course, in richer households there 
will be servants to do all this ; but even in them the 
daughter will frequently weave either for herself or 
her parents. Almost every girl will do something, 
if only to pass the time. 

They have no accomplishments. They do not 



176 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

sing, nor play, nor paint It must never be forgotten 
that their civilization is relatively a thousand years 
behind ours. Accomplishments are part of the polish 
that a civilization gives, and this they have not yet 
reached. Accomplishments are also the means to 
fill up time otherwise unoccupied ; but very few 
Burmese girls have any time on their hands. There 
is no leisured class, and there are very few girls who 
have not to help, in one way or another, at the 
upkeep of the household. 

Mr. Rudyard Kipling tells of a young lady who 
played the banjo. He has been more fortunate 
than myself, for I have never heard of such a person. 
They have no accomplishments at all. House- 
keeping they have not very much of. Houses are 
small, and households also are small ; and there is 
very little furniture ; and as the cooking is all the 
same, there is not much to learn in that way. I 
fear, too, that their houses could not compete as 
models of neatness with any other nation. Tidiness 
is one of the last gifts of civilization. We now 
pride ourselves on our order ; we forget how very 
recent an accomplishment it is. To them it will 
come with the other gifts of age, for it must never 
be forgotten that they are a very young people — 
only children, big children — learning very slowly the 
lessons of experience and knowledge. 

When they are between eight and fourteen years 
of age the boys become monks for a time, as every 
boy must, and they have a great festival at their 
entrance into the monastery. Girls do not enter 
nunneries, but they, too, have a great feast in their 
honour. They have their ears bored. It is a 



XIV WOMEN 177 

festival for a girl of great importance, this ear- 
boring, and, according to the wealth of the parents, 
it is accompanied by pwes and other rejoicings. 

A little girl, the daughter of a shopkeeper here in 
this town, had her ears bored the other day, and 
there were great rejoicings. There was a pwe open 
to all for three nights, and there were great quan- 
tities of food, and sweets, and many presents given 
away, and on the last night the river was illuminated. 
There was a boat anchored in mid-stream, and from 
this were launched myriads of tiny rafts, each with 
a little lamp on board. The lamps gleamed bright 
with golden light as they drifted on the bosom of 
the great water, a moving line of living fire. There 
were little boats, too, with the outlines marked with 
lamps, and there were pagodas and miniature houses 
all floating, floating down the river, till, in far dis- 
tance by the promontory, the lamps flickered out 
one by one, and the river fell asleep again. 

' There is only one great festival in a girl's life,' a 
woman told me. ' We try to make it as good as we 
can. Boys have many festivals, girls have but one. 
It is only just that it should be good.' 

And so they grow up very quiet, very sedate, 
looking on the world about them with very clear 
eyes. It is strange, talking to Burmese girls, to see 
how much they know and understand of the world 
about them. It is to them no great mystery, full of 
unimaginable good and evil, but a world that they 
are learning to understand, and where good and evil 
are never unmixed. Men are to them neither angels 
nor devils, but just men, and so the world does not 
hold for them the disappointments, the disillusionings 

N 



178 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

that await those who do not know. They have their 
dreams — who shall doubt it ? — dreams of him who 
shall love them, whom they shall love, who shall 
make life one great glory to them ; but their dreams 
are dreams that can come true. They do not frame 
to themselves ideals out of their own ignorance and 
imagine these to be good, but they keep their eyes 
wide open to the far more beautiful realities that are 
around them every day. They know that a living 
lover is greater, and truer, and better than any ideal 
of a girl's dream. They live in a real world, and 
they know it is good. 

In time the lover comes. There is a delightful 
custom all through Burma, an institution, in fact, 
called ' courting- time.' It is from nine till ten 
o'clock, more especially on moonlight nights, those 
wonderful tropic nights, when the whole world lies 
in a silver dream, when the little wandering airs that 
touch your cheek like a caress ar^ heavy with the 
scent of flowers, and your heart comes into your 
throat for the very beauty of life. 

There is in front of every house a veranda, raised 
perhaps three feet from the ground, and there the 
girl will sit in the shadow of the eaves, sometimes 
with a friend, but usually alone ; and her suitors will 
come and stand by the veranda, and talk softly in 
little broken sentences, as lovers do. There may be 
many young men come, one by one, if they mean 
business, with a friend if it be merely a visit of 
courtesy. And the girl will receive them all, and 
will talk to them all ; will laugh with a little 
humorous knowledge of each man's peculiarities ; 
and she may give them cheroots, of her own making; 



XIV WOMEN 179 

and, for one perhaps, for one, she will light the 
cheroot herself first, and thus kiss him by proxy. 

And is the girl alone ? Well, yes. To all intents 
and purposes she is alone ; but there is always some- 
one near, someone within call, for the veranda is free 
to all. She cannot tell who may come, and some 
men, as we know, are but wolves in sheep's cloth- 
ing. Usually marriages are arranged by the parents. 
Girls are not very different here to elsewhere ; they 
are very biddable, and ready to do what their 
mothers tell them, ready to believe that it is the 
best. And so if a lad comes wooing, and can gain 
the mother's ear, he can usually win the girl's affec- 
tion, too ; but I think there are more exceptions 
here than elsewhere. Girls are freer ; they fall in 
love of their own accord oftener than elsewhere ; 
they are very impulsive, full of passion. Love is a 
very serious matter, and they are not trained in 
self-restraint. . 

There are very many romances played out every 
day in the dusk beside the well, in the deep shadows 
of the palm-groves, in the luminous nights by the 
river shore — romances that end sometimes well, 
sometimes in terrible tragedies. For they are a 
very passionate people ; the language is full of little 
love-songs, songs of a man to a girl, of a girl to a 
man. ' No girl,' a woman once told me, ' no good, 
quiet girl would tell a man she loved him first.' It 
may be so ; if this be true, I fear there are many 
girls here who are not good and quiet. How many 
romances have I not seen in which the wooing began 
with the girl, with a little note perhaps, with a flower, 
with a message sent by someone whom she could 



i8o THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

trust ! Of course many of these turned out well. 
Parents are good to their children, and if they can, 
they will give their daughter the husband of her 
choice. They remember what youth is — nay, they 
themselves never grow old, I think ; they never for- 
get what once was to them now is to their children. 
So if it be possible all may yet go well. Social 
differences are not so great as with us, and the 
barrier is easily overcome. I have often known 
servants in a house, marry the daughters, and be 
taken into the family ; but, of course, sometimes 
things do not go so smoothly. And then ? Well, 
then there is usually an elopement, and a ten days' 
scandal ; and sometimes, too, there is an elopement 
for no reason at all save that hot youth cannot abide 
the necessary delay. 

For life is short, and though to-day be to us, 
who can tell for the morrow ? During the full 
moon there is no night, only a change to silver 
light from golden ; and the forest is full of delight. 
There a.re wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where 
the water falls, soft beds of torn bracken and fragrant 
grasses where great trees make a shelter from the 
heat ; and for food, that is easily arranged. A 
basket of rice with a little salt-fish and spices is 
easily hidden in a favourable place. You only want 
a jar to cook it, and there is enough for two for a 
week ; or it is brought day by day by some trusted 
friend to a place previously agreed upon. 

All up and down the forest there are flowers for 
her hair, scarlet dak blossoms and orchid sprays 
and jasmine stars ; and for occupation through the 
hours each has a new world to explore full of 



XIV 



WOMEN i8i 



wonderful undreamt-of discoveries, lit with new light 
and mysterious with roseate shadows, a world of 
'beautiful things made new ' for those forest children. , , , 
So that when the confidante, an aunt maybe or a ^''1 ^' 
sister, meets them by the sacred fig-tree on the hill, 
and tells them that all difficulties are removed, and 
their friends called together for the marriage, can 
you wonder that it is not without regret that they 
fare forth from that enchanted land to ordinary life 
again ? 

It is, as I have said, not always the man who is 
the proposer of the flight. Nay, I think indeed that 
it is usually the girl. ' Men have more patience.' 

I had a Burmese servant, a boy, who may have 
been twenty, and he had been with me a year, and 
was beginning to be really useful. He had at last 
grasped the idea that electro -plate should not be 
cleaned with monkey-brand soap, and he could be 
trusted not to put up rifle cartridges for use with a 
double-barrelled gun ; and he chose this time to fall 
in love with the daughter of the headman of a 
certain village where I was in camp. 

He had good excuse, for she was a delicious 
little maiden with great coils of hair, and the voice 
of a wood-pigeon cooing in the forest, and she was 
very fond of him, without a doubt. 

So one evening he came to me and said that he 
must leave me — that he wanted to get married, and 
could not possibly delay. Then I spoke to him with 
all that depth of wisdom we are so ready to display 
for the benefit of others. I pointed out to him that 
he was much too young, that she was much too 
young also — she was not eighteen — and that there 



uLl 



1 82 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

was absolutely nothing for them to marry on. I 
further pointed out how ungrateful it would be of 
him to leave me ; that he had been paid regularly 
for a year, and that it was not right that now, when 
he was at last able to do something besides destroy 
my property, he should go away. 

The boy listened to all I had to say, and agreed 
with it all, and made the most fervent and sincere 
promise to be wise ; and he went away after dinner 
to see the girl and tell her, and when I awoke in the 
morning my other servants told me the boy had not 
returned. 

Shortly afterwards the headman came to say that 
his daughter had also disappeared. They had fled, 
those two, into the forest, and for a week we heard 
nothing. At last one evening, as I sat under the 
great fig-tree by my tent, there came to me the 
mother of the girl, and she sat down before me, 
and said she had something of great importance to 
impart : and this was that all had been arranged 
between the families, who had found work for the 
boy whereby he might maintain himself and his 
wife, and the marriage was arranged. But the boy 
would not return as long as I was in camp there, 
for he was bitterly ashamed of his broken vows and 
afraid to meet my anger. And so the mother 
begged me to go away as soon as I could, that the 
young couple might return. I explained that I was 
not angry at all, that the boy could return without 
any fear ; on the contrary, that I should be pleased 
to see him and his wife. And, at the old lady's 
request, I wrote a Burmese letter to that effect, and 
she went away delighted. 



XIV WOMEN 183 



They must have been in hiding close by, for it '--^i-i^ 
was early next morning that the boy came into my 
tent alone and very much abashed, and it was some 
little time before ;he could recover himself and talk 
freely as he would before, for he was greatly ashamed 
of himself 

But, after all, could he help it ? 

If you can imagine the tropic night, and the boy, 
full of high resolve, passing up the village street, 
now half asleep, and the girl, with shining eyes, 
coming to him out of the hibiscus shadows, and 
whispering in his ear words — words that I need not 
say — if you imagine all that, you will understand 
how it was that I lost my servant. 

They both came to see me later on in the day 
after the marriage, and there was no bashfulness 
about either of them then. They came hand-in- 
hand, with the girl's father and mother and some 
friends, and she told me it was all her fault : she 
could not wait. 

' Perhaps,' she said, with a little laugh and a side- 
glance at her husband — ' perhaps, if he had gone 
with the thakin to Rangoon, he might have fallen 
in love with someone there and forgotten me ; for 
I know they are very pretty, those Rangoon ladies, 
and of better manners than I, who am but a jungle 
girl' 

And when I asked her what it was like in the 
forest, she said it was the most beautiful place in all 
the world. 

Things do not always go so well. Parents may 
be obdurate, and flight be impossible ; or even her 
love may not be returned, and then terrible things 



1 84 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

happen. I have held, not once nor twice alone, 
inquests over the bodies, the fair, innocent bodies, 
of quite young girls v/ho died for love. Only that, 
because their love was unreturned ; and so the sore 
little heart turned in her trouble to the great river, 
and gave herself and her hot despair to the cold 
forgetfulness of its waters. 

They love so greatly that they cannot face a 
world where love is not. All the country is full of 
the romance of love — of love passionate and great 
as woman has ever felt. It seems to me here th^t 
woman has something of the passions of man, not 
only the enduring affection of a woman, but the 
hot love and daring of a man. It is part of their 
heritage, perhaps, as a people in their youth. One 
sees so much of it, hears so much of it, here. I 
have seen a girl in man's attire killed in a surprise 
attack upon an insurgent camp. She had followed 
her outlawed lover there, and in the melee she caught 
up sword and gun to fight by his side, and was cut 
down through neck and shoulder ; for no one could 
tell in the early dawn that it was a girl. 

She died about an hour afterwards, and though I 
have seen many sorrowful things in many lands, in 
war and out of it, the memory of that dying girl, 
held up by one of the mounted police, sobbing out 
her life beneath the wild forest shadow, with no one 
of her sex, no one of her kin to help her, comes 
back to me as one of the saddest and strangest. 

Her lover was killed in action some time later 
fighting against us, and he died as a brave man 
should, his face to his enemy. He played his game, 
he lost, and paid ; but the girl ? 



XIV WOMEN 185 

I have seen and heard so much of this love of 
women and of its tragedies. Perhaps it is that to us 
it is usually the tragedies that are best remembered. 
Happiness is void of incident. And this love may 
be, after ail, a good thing. But I do not know. 
Sometimes I think they would be happier if they 
could love less, if they could take love more quietly, 
more as a matter of course, as something that has 
to be gone through, as part of a life's training ; not 
as a thing that swallows up all life and death and 
eternity in one passion. 

In Burmese the love-songs are in a short, sweet 
rhythm, full of quaint conceits and word-music. I 
cannot put them into English verse, or give the flow 
of the originals in a translation. It always seems to 
me that Don Quixote was right when he said that a 
translation was like the wrong side of an embroidered 
cloth, giving the design without the beauty. But even 
in the plain, rough outline of a translation there is 
beauty here, I think : 

From a Man to a Girl 

The moon wooed the lotus in the night, the lotus 
was wooed by the moon, and my sweetheart is their 
child. The blossom opened in the night, and she 
came forth ; the petals moved, and she was born. 

She is more beautiful than any blossom ; her face 
is as delicate as the dusk ; her hair is as night falling 
over the hills ; her skin is as bright as the diamond. 
She is very full of health, no sickness can come 
near her. 

When the wind blows I am afraid, when the 



1 86 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xiv 

breezes move I fear. I fear lest the south wind 
take her, I tremble lest the breath of evening woo 
her from me — so light is she, so graceful. 

Her dress is of gold, even of silk and gold, and 
her bracelets are of fine gold. She hath precious 
stones in her ears, but her eyes, what jewels can 
compare unto them ? 

She is proud, my mistress ; she is very proud, and 
all men are afraid of her. She is so beautiful and 
so proud that all men fear her. 

In the whole world there is none anywhere that 
can compare unto her. 



CHAPTER XV 



WOMEN II 



* The husband is lord of the wife. ' 

Laws of Manu. 

Marriage is not a religious ceremony among the 
Burmese. Religion has no part in it at all ; as 
religion has refrained from interfering with govern- 
ment, so does it in the relations of man and wife. 
Marriage is purely a worldly business, like entering 
into partnership; and religion, the Buddhist religion, 
has nothing to do with such things. Those who 
accept the teachings of the great teacher in all their 
fulness do not marry. 

Indeed, marriage is not a ceremony at all. It is 
strange to find that the Burmese have actually no 
necessary ceremonial. The Laws of Manu, which 
are the laws governing all such matters, make no 
mention of any marriage ceremony ; it is, in fact, a 
status. Just as two men may go into partnership 
in business without executing any deed, so a man 
and a woman may enter into the marriage state 
without undergoing any form. Amongst the richer 
Burmese there is, however, sometimes a ceremony. 

187 



i88 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Friends are called to the wedding, and a ribbon 
is stretched round the couple, and then their hands 
are clasped ; they also eat out of the same dish. 
All this is very pretty, but not at all necessary. 

It is, indeed, not a settled point in law what con- 
stitutes a marriage, but there are certain things that 
will render it void. For instance, no marriage can 
be a marriage without the consent of the girl's 
parents if she be under age, and there are certain 
other conditions which must be fulfilled. 

But although there be this doubt about the actual 
ceremony of marriage, there is none at all about the 
status. There is no confusion between a woman 
who is married and a woman who is not. The con- 
dition of marriage is well known, and it brings the 
parties under the laws that pertain to husband and 
wife. A woman not married does not, of course, 
obtain these privileges ; there is a very strict line 
between the two. 

Amongst the poorer people a marriage is frequently 
kept secret for several days. The great pomp and 
ceremony which with us, and occasionally with a 
few rich Burmese, consecrate a man and a woman to 
each other for life, are absent at the greater number 
of Burmese marriages ; and the reason they tell me 
is that the girl is shy. She does not like to be 
stared at, and wondered at, as a maiden about to 
be a wife ; it troubles her that the affairs of her 
heart, her love, her marriage, should be so public. 
The young men come at night and throw stones 
upon the house roof, and demand presents from the 
bridegroom. He does not mind giving the presents; 
but he, too, does not like the publicity. And so 



XV WOMEN 189 

marriage, which is with most people a ceremony 
performed in full daylight with all accessories of 
display, is with the Burmese generally a secret. 
Two or three friends, perhaps, will be called quietly 
to the house, and the man and the woman will eat 
together, and thus become husband and wife. Then 
they will separate again, and not for several days, or 
even weeks perhaps, will it be known that they are 
married ; for it is seldom that they can set up house 
for themselves just at once. Often they will marry 
and live apart for a time with their parents. Some- 
times they will go and live together with the man's 
parents, but more usually with the girl's mother. 
Then after a time, when they have by their exer- 
tions made a little money, they build a house and 
go to live there ; but sometimes they will live on 
with the girl's parents for years. 

A girl does not change her name when she 
marries, nor does she wear any sign of marriage, 
such as a ring. Her name is always the same, and 
there is nothing to a stranger to denote whether she 
be married or not, or whose wife she is ; and she 
keeps her property as her own. Marriage does not 
confer upon the husband any power over his wife's 
property, either what she brings with her, what she 
earns, or what she inherits subsequently ; it all 
remains her own, as does his remain his own. But 
usually property acquired after marriage is held 
jointly. You will inquire, for instance, who is the 
owner of this garden, and be told Maung Han, Ma 
Shwe, the former being the husband's name and the 
latter the wife's. Both names are used very frequently 
in business and in legal proceedings, and indeed it is 



I90 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

usual for both husband and wife to sign all deeds 
they may have occasion to execute. Nothing more 
free than a woman's position in the marriage state 
can be imagined. By law she is absolutely the 
mistress of her own property and her own self; and 
if it usually happens that the husband is the head of 
the house, that is because his nature gives him that 
position, not any law. 

With us marriage means to a girl an utter breaking 
of her old ties, the beginning of a new life, of new 
duties, of new responsibilities. She goes out into a 
new and unknown world, full of strange facts, leaving 
one dependence for another, the shelter of a father 
for the shelter of a husband. She has even lost her 
own name, and becomes known but as the mistress 
of her husband ; her soul is merged in his. But in 
Burma it is not so at all. She is still herself, still 
mistress of herself, an equal partner for life. 

I have said that the Burmese have no ideals, and 
this is true ; but in the Laws of Manu there are laid 
down some of the requisite qualities for a perfect 
wife. There are seven kinds of wife, say the Laws 
of Manu : a wife like a thief, like an enemy, like a 
master, like a friend, like a sister, like a mother, 
like a slave. The last four of these are good, 
but the last is the best, and these are some of her 
qualities : 

* She should fan and soothe her master to sleep, 
and sit by him near the bed on which he lies. She 
will fear and watch lest anything should disturb him. 
Every noise will be a terror to her ; the hum of a 
mosquito as the blast of a trumpet ; the fall of a leaf 
without will sound as loud as thunder. Even she 



XV WOMEN 191 

will guard her breath as it passes her lips to and 
fro, lest she awaken him whom she fears. 

'And she will remember that when he awakens 
he will have certain wants. She will be anxious 
that the bath be to his custom, that his clothes are 
as he wishes, that his food is tasteful to him. Always 
she will have before her the fear of his anger.' 

It must be remembered that the Laws of Manu 
are of Indian origin, and are not totally accepted by 
the Burmese. I fear a Burmese girl would laugh at 
this ideal of a wife. She would say that if a wife 
were always afraid of her husband's wrath, she and 
he, too, must be poor things. A household is ruled 
by love and reverence, not by fear. A girl has no 
idea when she marries that she is going to be her 
husband's slave, but a free woman, yielding to him in 
those things in which he has most strength, and 
taking her own way in those things that pertain to a 
woman. She has a very keen idea of what things 
she can do best, and what things she should leave 
to her husband. Long experience has taught her 
that there are many things she should not interfere 
with ; and she knows it is experience that has proved 
it, and not any command. She knows that the reason 
women are not supposed to interfere in public affairs 
is because their minds and bodies are not fitted for 
them. Therefore she accepts this, in the same way 
as she accepts physical inferiority, as a fact against 
which it is useless and silly to declaim, knowing that 
it is not men who keep her out, but her own unfitness. 
Moreover, she knows that it is made good to her in 
other ways, and thus the balance is redressed. You 
see, she knows her own strength and her own weak- 



192 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

ness. Can there be a more valuable knowledge for 
anyone than this ? 

In many ways she will act for her husband with 
vigour and address, and she is not afraid of appear- 
ing in his name or her own in law courts, for instance, 
or in transacting certain kinds of business. She 
knows that she can do certain business as well as or 
better than her husband, and she does it. There is 
nothing more remarkable than the way in which she 
makes a division of these matters in which she can 
act for herself, and those in which, if she act at all, 
it is for her husband. 

Thus, as I have said, she will, as regards her own 
property or her own business, act freely in her own 
name, and will also frequently act for her husband 
too. They will both sign deeds, borrow money on 
joint security, lend money repayable to them jointly. 
But in public affairs she will never allow her name 
to appear at all. Not that she does not take a 
keen interest in such things. She lives in no world 
apart ; all that affects her husband interests her as 
keenly as it does him. She lives in a world of men 
and women, and her knowledge of public affairs, and 
her desire and powers of influencing them, is great. 
But she learnt long ago that her best way is to act 
through and by her husband, and that his strength 
and his name are her bucklers in the fight. Thus 
women are never openly concerned in any political 
matters. How strong their feeling is can better be 
illustrated by a story than in any other way. 

In 1889 I was stationed far away on the north- 
west frontier of Burma, in charge of some four 
thousand square miles of territory which had been 



XV WOMEN 193 

newly incorporated. I went up there with the first 
column that ever penetrated that country, and I 
remained there when, after the partial pacification 
of the district, the main body of the troops were 
withdrawn. It was a fairly exciting place to live in. 
To say nothing of the fever which swept down men 
in batches, and the trans-frontier people who were 
always peeping over to watch a good opportunity 
for a raid, my own charge simply swarmed with 
armed men, who seemed to rise out of the very 
ground — so hard was it to follow their movements 
— attack anywhere they saw fit, and disappear as 
suddenly. There was, of course, a considerable 
force of troops and police to suppress these insur- 
gents, but the whole country was so roadless, so 
unexplored, such a tangled labyrinth of hill and 
forest, dotted with sparse villages, that it was often 
quite impossible to trace the bands who committed 
these attacks ; and to the sick and weary pursuers 
it sometimes seemed as if we should never restore 
peace to the country. 

The villages were arranged in groups, and over 
each group there was a headman with certain powers 
and certain duties, the principal of the latter being 
to keep his people quiet, and, if possible, protect 
them from insurgents. 

Now, it happened that among these headmen was 
one named Saw Ka, who had been a free-lance in 
his day, but whose services were now enlisted on the 
side of order — or, at least, we hoped so. He was a 
fighting-man, and rather fond of that sort of exer- 
cise ; so that I was not much surprised one day 
when I got a letter from him to say that his villagers 

O 



194- THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

had pursued and arrested, after a fight, a number of 
armed robbers, who had tried to lift some of the 
village cattle. The letter came to me when I was in 
my court-house, a tent ten feet by eight, trying a case. 
So, saying I would see Saw Ka's people later, and 
giving orders for the prisoners to be put in the lock- 
up, I went on with my work. When my case was 
finished, I happened to notice that among those 
sitting and waiting without my tent-door was Saw 
Ka himself, so I sent to call him in, and I compli- 
mented him upon his success. * It shall be reported,' 
I said, * to the Commissioner, who will, no doubt, 
reward you for your care and diligence in the public 
service.* 

As I talked I noticed that the man seemed rather 
bewildered, and when I had finished he said that he 
really did not understand. He was aware, he added 
modestly, that he was a diligent headman, always 
active in good deeds,- and a terror to dacoits and 
other evil-doers ; but as to these particular robbers 
and this fighting he was a little puzzled. 

I was considerably surprised, naturally, and I 
took from the table the Burmese letter describing 
the affair. It began, *Your honour, I, Maung Saw 
Ka, headman,' etc., and was in the usual style. I 
handed it to Saw Ka, and told him to read it. As 
he read his wicked black eyes twinkled, and when 
he had finished he said he had not been home for 
a week. 

* I came in from a visit to the river,' he said, 
'where I have gathered for your honour some 
private information. I had not been here five 
minutes before I was called in. All this the letter 



XV WOMEN 195 

speaks of is news to me, and must have happened 
while I was away.' 

' Then, who wrote the letter ? ' I asked. 

* Ah ! ' he said, * I think I know ; but I will go 
and make sure.' 

Then Saw Ka went to find the guard who had 
come in with the prisoners, and I dissolved court 
and went out shooting. After dinner, as we sat 
round a great bonfire before the mess, for the nights 
were cold. Saw Ka and his brother came to me, 
and they sat down beside the fire and told me all 
about it. 

It appeared that three days after Saw Ka left his 
village, some robbers came suddenly one evening 
to a small hamlet some two miles away and looted 
from there all the cattle, thirty or forty head, and 
went off with them. The frightened owners came 
in to tell the headman about it, and in his absence 
they told his wife. And she, by virtue of the order 
of appointment as headman, which was in her hands, 
ordered the villagers to turn out and follow the 
dacoits. She issued such government arms as she 
had in the house, and the villagers went and pursued 
the dacoits by the cattle tracks, and next day they 
overtook them, and there was a fight. When the 
villagers returned with the cattle and the thieves, 
she had the letter written to me, and the prisoners 
were sent in, under her husband's brother, with an 
escort. Everything was done as well, as successfully, 
as if Saw Ka himself had been present. But if it 
had not been for the accident of Saw Ka's sudden 
appearance, I should probably never have known 
that this exploit was due to his wife ; for she was 



196 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

acting for her husband, and she would not have been 
pleased that her name should appear. 

' A good wife,' I said to Saw Ka. 

* Like many,' he answered. 

But in her own line she has no objection to 
publicity. I have said that nearly all women work, 
and that is so. Married or unmarried, from the age 
of sixteen or seventeen, almost every woman has 
some occupation besides her own duties. In the 
higher classes she will have property of her own to 
manage ; in the lower classes she will have some 
trade. I cannot find that in Burma there have ever 
been certain occupations told off for women in which 
they may work, and others tabooed to them. As 
there is no caste for the men, so there is none for 
the women. They have been free to try their hands 
at anything they thought they could excel in, with- 
out any fear of public opinion. But nevertheless, 
as is inevitable, it has been found that there are 
certain trades in which women can compete success- 
fully with men, and certain others in which they 
cannot. And these are not quite the same as in the 
West. We usually consider sewing to be a feminine 
occupation. In Burma, there being no elaborately 
cut and trimmed garments, the amount of sewing 
done is small, but that is usually done by men. 
Women often own and use small hand-machines, 
but the treadles are always used by men only. As 
I am writing, my Burmese orderly is sitting in the 
garden sewing his jacket. He is usually sewing 
when not sent on messages. He seems to sew very 
well. 

Weaving is usually done by women. Under 



XV WOMEN 197 

nearly every house there will be a loom, where the 
wife or daughter weaves for herself or for sale. But 
many men weave also, and the finest silks are all 
woven by men. I once asked a woman why they 
did not weave the best silks, instead of leaving them 
all to the men. 

* Men do them better,' she said, with a laugh. 
* I tried once, but I cannot manage that embroidery.' 

They also work in the fields — light work, such as 
weeding and planting. The heavy work, such as 
ploughing, is done by men. They also work on the 
roads carrying things, as all Oriental women do. It 
is curious that women carry always on their heads, 
men always on their shoulders. I do not know why. 

But the great occupation of women is petty 
trading. I have already said that there are few 
large merchants among the Burmese. Nearly all 
the retail trade is small, most of it is very small 
indeed, and practically the whole of it is in the hands 
of the women. 

Women do not often succeed in any wholesale 
trade. They have not, I think, a wide enough 
grasp of affairs for that. Their views are always 
somewhat limited ; they are too penny- wise and 
pound-foolish for big businesses. The small retail 
trade, gaining a penny here and a penny there, just 
suits them, and they have almost made it a close 
profession. 

This trade is almost exclusively done in bazaars. 
In every town there is a bazaar, from six till ten 
each morning. When there is no town near, the 
bazaar will be held on one day at one village and on 
another at a neighbouring one. It depends on the 



198 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

density of population, the means of communication, 
and other matters. But a bazaar within reach there 
must always be, for it is only there that most articles 
can be bought. The bazaar is usually held in a 
public building erected for the purpose, and this 
may vary from a great market built of brick and 
iron to a small thatched shed. Sometimes, indeed, 
there is no building at all, merely a space of beaten 
ground. 

The great bazaar in Mandalay is one of the sights 
of the city. The building in which it is held is the 
property of the municipality, but is leased out. It 
is a series of enormous sheds, with iron roofs and 
beaten earth floor. Each trade has a shed or sheds 
to itself There is a place for rice-sellers, for butchers, 
for vegetable-sellers, for the vendors of silks, of 
cottons, of sugar and spices, of firewood, of jars, of 
fish. The butchers are all natives of India. I have 
explained elsewhere why this should be. The fire- 
wood-sellers will mostly be men, as will also the 
large rice - merchants, but nearly all the rest are 
women. 

You will find the sellers of spices, fruit, vegetables, 
and other such matters seated in long rows, on mats 
placed upon the ground. Each will have a square 
of space allotted, perhaps six feet square, and there 
she will sit with her merchandise in a basket or 
baskets before her. For each square they will pay 
the lessee a halfpenny for the day, which is only 
three hours or so. The time to go is in the morn- 
ing from six till eight, for that is the busy time. 
Later on all the stalls will be closed, but in the early 
morning the market is thronged. Every house- 



XV WOMEN 199 

holder is then buying his or her provisions for the 
day, and the people crowd in thousands round the 
sellers. Everyone is bargaining and chaffing and 
laughing, both buyers and sellers ; but both are very 
keen, too, on business. 

The cloth and silk sellers, the large rice-merchants, 
and a few other traders, cannot carry on business 
sitting on a mat, nor can they carry their wares to 
and fro every day in a basket. For such there are 
separate buildings or separate aisles, with wooden 
stalls, on either side of a gangway. The wooden 
floor of the stalls is raised two to three feet, so that 
the buyer, standing on the ground, is about on a 
level with the seller sitting in the stall. The stall 
will be about eight feet by ten, and each has at the 
back a strong lock-up cupboard or wardrobe, where 
the wares are shut at night ; but in the day they will 
be taken out and arranged daintily about the girl- 
seller. Home-made silks are the staple — silks in 
checks of pink and white, of yellow and orange, of 
indigo and dark red. Some are embroidered in silk, 
in silver, or in gold ; some are plain. All are thick 
and rich, none are glazed, and none are gaudy. 
There will also be silks from Bangkok, which are 
of two colours — purple shot with red, and orange 
shot with red, both very beautiful. All the silks are 
woven the size of the dress : for men, about twenty- 
eight feet long and twenty inches broad ; and for 
women, about five feet long and much broader. 
Thus, there is no cutting off the piece. The anas, 
too, which are the bottom pieces for a woman's 
dress, are woven the proper size. There will 
probably, too, be piles of showy cambric jackets and 



200 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

gauzy silk handkerchiefs ; but often these are sold 
at separate stalls. 

But prettier than the silks are the sellers, for 
these are nearly all girls and women, sweet and 
fresh in their white jackets, with flowers in their hair. 
And they are all delighted to talk to you and show 
you their goods, even if you do not buy ; and they 
will take a compliment sedately, as a girl should, and 
they will probably charge you an extra rupee for it 
when you come to pay for your purchases. So it is 
never wise for a man, unless he have a heart of stone, 
to go marketing for silks. He should always ask a 
lady friend to go with him and do the bargaining, 
and he will lose no courtesy thereby, for these women 
know how to be courteous to fellow-women as well 
as to fellow-men. 

In the provincial bazaars it is much the same. 
There may be a few travelling merchants from 
Rangoon or Mandalay, most of whom are men ; 
but nearly all the retailers are women. Indeed, 
speaking broadly, it may be said that the retail trade 
of the country is in the hands of the women, and 
they nearly all trade on their own account. Just as 
the men farm their own land, the women own their 
businesses. They are not saleswomen for others, 
but traders on their own account ; and with the 
exception of the silk and cloth branches of the trade, 
it does not interfere with home-life. The bazaar 
lasts but three hours, and a woman has ample time 
for her home duties when her daily visit to the 
bazaar is over ; she is never kept away all day in 
shops and factories. 

Her home-life is always the centre of her life ; 



XV WOMEN 20I 

she could not neglect it for any other : it would 
seem to her a losing of the greater in the less. But 
the effect of this custom of nearly every woman 
having a little business of her own has a great 
influence on her life. It broadens her views ; it 
teaches her things she could not learn in the narrow 
circle of home duties ; it gives her that tolerance 
and understanding which so forcibly strikes every- 
one who knows her. It teaches her to know her 
own strength and weakness, and how to make the 
best of each. Above all, by showing her the real 
life about her, and how much beauty there is every- 
where, to those whose eyes are not shut by conven- 
tions, it saves her from that dreary, weary pessimism 
that seeks its relief in fancied idealism, in art, in 
literature, and in religion, and which is the curse of 
so many of her sisters in other lands. 

Yet, with all their freedom, Burmese women are 
very particular in their conduct. Do not imagine 
that young girls are allowed, or allow themselves, to 
go about alone except on very frequented roads. I 
suppose there are certain limits in all countries to 
the freedom a woman allows herself, that is to say, 
if she is wise. For she knows that she cannot 
always trust herself; she knows that she is weak 
sometimes, and she protects herself accordingly. 
She is timid, with a delightful timidity that fears, 
because it half understands ; she is brave, with the 
bravery of a girl who knows that as long as she 
keeps within certain limits she is safe. Do not 
suppose that they ever do, or ever can, allow them- 
selves that freedom of action that men have ; it is an 
impossibility. Girls are very carefully looked after 



202 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

by their mothers, and wives by their husbands ; and 
they delight in observing the limits which experience 
has indicated to them. There is a funny story 
which will illustrate what I mean. A great friend 
of mine, an officer in government service, went 
home not very long ago and married, and came out 
again to Burma with his wife. They settled down 
in a little up-country station. His duties were such 
as obliged him to go very frequently on tour far 
away from his home, and he would be absent ten 
days at a time or more. So when it came for the 
first time that he was obliged to go out and leave 
his wife behind him alone in the house, he gave his 
head-servant very careful directions. This servant 
was a Burman who had been with him for many 
years, who knew all his ways, and who was a very 
good servant. He did not speak English ; and my 
friend gave him strict orders. 

' The mistress,' he said, * has only just come here 
to Burma, and she does not know the ways of the 
country, nor what to do. So you must see that no 
harm comes to her in any way while I am in the 
jungle.' 

Then he gave directions as to what was to be 
done in any eventuality, and he went out. 

He was away for about a fortnight, and when he 
returned he found all well. The house had not 
caught fire, nor had thieves stolen anything, nor had 
there been any difficulty at all. The servant had 
looked after the other servants well, and my friend 
was well pleased. But his wife complained. 

* It has been very dull,' she said, ' while you were 
away. No one came to see me ; of all the officers 



XV WOMEN 203 

here, not one ever called. I saw only two or three 
ladies, but not a man at all/ 

And my friend, surprised, asked his servant how 
it was. 

* Didn't anyone come to call ? ' he asked. 

* Oh yes,' the servant answered ; * many gentle- 
men came to call — the officers of the regiment and 
others. But I told them the thakin was out, and 
that the thakinma could not see anyone. I sent 
them all away.' 

At the club that evening my friend was questioned 
as to why in his absence no one was allowed to see 
his wife. The whole station laughed at him, but I 
think he and his wife laughed most of all at the 
careful observances of Burmese etiquette by the 
servant ; for it is the Burmese custom for a wife not 
to receive in her husband's absence. Anyone who 
wants to see her must stay outside or in the veranda, 
and she will come out and speak to him. It would 
be a grave breach of decorum to receive visitors while 
her husband is out. 

So that even a Burmese woman is not free from 
restrictions — restrictions which are merely rules 
founded upon experience. No woman, no man, 
can ever free herself or himself from the bonds 
that even a young civilization demands. A freedom 
from all restraint would be a return, not only to 
savagery, but to the condition of animals — nay, even 
animals are bound by certain conventions. 

The higher a civilization, the more conventions are 
required ; and freedom does not mean an absence of 
rules, but that all rules should be founded on ex- 
perience and common sense. 



204 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xv 

There are certain restrictions on a woman's actions 
which must be observed as long as men are men and 
women women. That the Burmese woman never 
recognizes them unless they are necessary, and then 
accepts the necessity as a necessity, is the fact 
wherein her freedom lies. If at any time she 
should recognize that a restriction was unnecessary, 
she would reject it. If experience told her further 
restrictions were required, she would accept them 
without a doubt. 



CHAPTER XVI 

WOMEN III 

*For women are very tender-hearted.' 

Wethandaya. 

* You know, thakin/ said a man to me, ' that we say 
sometimes that women cannot attain unto the great 
deliverance, that only men will come there. We 
think that a woman must be born again as a man 
before she can enter upon the way that leads to 
heaven.' 

' Why should that be so ? ' I asked. * I have 
looked at the life of the Buddha, I have read the 
sacred books, and I can find nothing about it. 
What makes you think that ? ' 

He explained it in this way : ' Before a soul can 
attain deliverance it must renounce the world, it 
must have purified itself by wisdom and meditation 
from all the lust of the flesh. Only those who have 
done this can enter into the Great Peace. And 
many men do this. The country is full of monks, 
men who have left the world, and are trying to 
follow in the path of the great teacher. Not all 
these will immediately attain to heaven, for purifi- 

205 



2o6 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

cation is a very long process ; but they have entered 
into the path, they have seen the light, if it be even 
a long way off yet. They know whither they would 
go. But women, see how few become nuns ! Only 
those who have suffered such shipwreck in life that 
this world holds nothing more for them worth having 
become nuns. And they are very few. For a 
hundred monks there is not one nun. Women are 
too attached to their home, to their fathers, their 
husbands, their children, to enter into the holy life ; 
and, therefore, how shall they come to heaven except 
they return as men ? Our teacher says nothing about 
it, but we have eyes, and we can see.' 

All this is true. Women have no desire for the 
holy life. They cannot tear themselves away from 
their home-life. If their passions are less than those 
of men, they have even less command over them 
than men have. Only the profoundest despair will 
drive a woman to a renunciation of the world. If 
on an average their lives are purer than those of 
men, they cannot rise to the heights to which men 
can. How many monks there are — how few nuns ! 
Not one to a hundred. 

Yet in some ways women are far more religious 
than men. If you go to the golden pagoda on the 
hilltop and count the people kneeling there doing 
honour to the teacher, you will find they are nearly 
all women. If you go to, the rest-houses by the 
monastery, where the monks recite the law on 
Sundays, you will find that the congregations are 
nearly all women. If you visit the monastery with- 
out the gate you will see many visitors bringing 
little presents, and they will be women. 



XVI WOMEN 207 

' Thakin, many men do not care for religion at 
all, but when a man does do so, he takes it very 
seriously. He follows it out to the end. He be- 
comes a monk, and surrenders the whole world. But 
with women it is different. Many women, nearly 
all women, will like religion, and none will take it 
seriously. We mix it up with our home-life, and our 
affections, and our worldly doings ; for we like a little 
of everything.' So said a woman to me. 

Is this always true ? I do not know, but it is 
very true in Burma. Nearly all the women are 
religious, they like to go to the monastery and hear 
the law, they like to give presents to the monks, they 
like to visit the pagoda and adore Gaudama the 
Buddha. I am sure that if it were not for their 
influence the laws against taking life and against 
intoxicants would not be observed as stringently as 
they are. So far they will go. As far as they can 
use the precepts of religion and retain their home- 
life they will do so ; as it was with Yathodaya so 
long ago, so it is now. But when religion calls 
them and says, * Come away from the world, leave 
all that you love, all that your heart holds good, for 
it is naught ; see the light, and prepare your soul 
for peace,* they hold back. This they cannot do ; it 
is far beyond them. * Thakin, we cannot do so. It 
would seem to us terrible,' that is what they say. 

A man who renounces the world is called * the 
great glory,' but not so aVoman. 

I have said that the Buddhist religion holds men 
and women as equal. If women cannot observe its 
laws as men do, it is surely their own fault if they 
be held the less worthy. 



2o8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xvi 

Women themselves admit this. They honour a 
man greatly who becomes a monk, not so a nun. 
Nuns have but little consideration. And why? 
Because what is good for a man is not good for a 
woman ; and if, indeed, renunciation of the world be 
the only path to the Great Peace, then surely it must 
be true that women must be born again. 



CHAPTER XVII 

DIVORCE 

' They are to each other as a burning poison falling into a man's 
eye. ' — Burmese saying. 

I REMEMBER a night not so long ago ; it was in the 
hot weather, and I was out in camp with my friend 
the police-officer. It was past sunset, and the air 
beneath the trees was full of luminous gloom, though 
overhead a flush still lingered on the cheek of the 
night. We were sitting in the veranda of a govern- 
ment rest-house, enjoying the first coolness of the 
coming night, and talking in disjointed sentences of 
many things ; and there came up the steps of the 
house into the veranda a woman. She came forward 
slowly, and then sat down on the floor beside my 
friend, and began to speak. There was a lamp 
burning in an inner room, and a long bar of light 
came through the door and lit her face. I could see 
she was not good-looking, but that her eyes were 
full of tears, and her face drawn with trouble. I 
recognized who she was, the wife of the head- 
constable in charge of the guard near by, a woman 
I had noticed once or twice in the guard. 

p 



2IO THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

She spoke so fast, so fast ; the words fell over 
each other as they came from her lips, for her heart 
was very full. 

I sat quite still and said nothing ; I think she 
hardly noticed I was there. It was all about her 
husband. Everything was wrong ; all had gone 
crooked in their lives, and she did not know what 
she could do. At first she could hardly tell what it 
was all about, but at last she explained. For some 
years, three or four years, matters had not been very 
smooth between them. They had quarrelled often, 
she said, about this thing and the other, little things 
mostly ; and gradually the rift had widened till it 
became very broad indeed. 

* Perhaps,* she said, * if I had been able to have 
a child it would have been different.' But fate was 
unkind and no baby came, and her husband became 
more and more angry with her. ' And yet I did all 
for the best, thakin ; I always tried to act for the 
best. My husband has sisters at Henzada, and they 
write to him now and then, and say, " Send ten 
rupees," or " send five rupees," or even twenty rupees. 
And I always say, " Send, send." Other wives would 
say, " No, we cannot afford it " ; but I said always, 
" Send, send." I have always done for the best, 
always for the best.' 

It was very pitiable to hear her opening her 
whole heart, such a sore troubled heart, like this. 
Her words were full of pathos ; her uncomely face 
was not beautified by the sorrow in it. And at last 
her husband took a second wife. 

* She is a girl from a village near ; the thakin 
knows, Taungywa. He did not tell me, but I soon 



XVII DIVORCE 2X1 

heard of it ; and although I thought my heart would 
break, I did not say anything. I told my husband, 
" Bring her here, let us live all together ; it will be 
best so." I always did for the best, thakin. So 
he brought her, and she came to live with us a week 
ago. Ah, thakin, I did not know ! She tramples 
on me. My head is under her feet. My husband 
does not care for me, only for her. And to-day, 
this evening, they went out together for a walk, and 
my husband took with him the concertina. As they 
went I could hear him play upon it, and they walked 
down through the trees, he playing and she leaning 
upon him. I heard the music' 

Then she began to cry bitterly, sobbing as if her 
heart would break. And the sunset died out of the 
sky, and the shadows took all the world and made 
it gray and dark. No one said anything, only the 
woman cried. 

' Thakin,' she said at last, * what am I to do ? 
Tell me.' 

Then my friend spoke. 

* You can divorce him,' he said ; * you can go 
to the elders and get a divorce. Won't that be 
best ? ' 

' But, thakin, you do not know. We are both 
Christians ; we are married for ever. We were 
both at the mission-school in Rangoon, and we 
were married there, " for ever and for ever," so the 
padre said. We are not married according to 
Burmese customs, but according to your religion ; 
we are husband and wife for ever.' 

My friend said nothing. It seemed to him useless 
to speak to her of the High Court, five hundred 



212 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

miles away, and a decree nisi ; it would have been a 
mockery of her trouble, 

'Your husband had no right to take a second 
wife, if you are Christians and married,' he said. 

* Ah,* she answered, * we are Burmans ; it is 
allowed by Burmese law. Other officials do it. 
What does my husband care that we were married 
by your law ? Here we are alone with no other 
Christians near. But I would not mind so much/ 
she went on, * only she treads me under her feet. 
And he takes her out and not me, who am the elder 
wife, and he plays music to her ; and I did all for 
the best. This trouble has come upon me, though 
all my life I have always acted for the best.' 

There came another footstep up the stair, and a 
man entered. It was her husband. On his return 
he had missed his wife, and guessed whither she 
had gone, and had followed her. He came alone. 

Then there was a sad scene, only restrained by 
respect for my friend. I need not tell it. There 
was a man's side to the question, a strong one. 
The wife had a terrible temper, a peevish, nagging, 
maddening fashion of talking. She was a woman 
very hard for a man to live with. 

Does it matter much which was right or wrong, 
now that the mischief was done ? They went away 
at last, not reconciled. Could they be reconciled ? 
I cannot tell. I left there next day, and have never 
returned. 

There they had lived for many years among their 
own people, far away from the influence that had 
come upon their childhood, and led them into strange 
ways. And now all that was left of that influence 



XVII DIVORCE 213 

was the chain that bound them together. Had it 
not been for that they would have been divorced 
long ago ; for they had never agreed very well, and 
both sides had bitter grounds for complaint. They 
would have been divorced, and both could have gone 
their own way. But now, what was to be done ? 

That is one of my memories : this is another. 

There was a girl I knew, the daughter of a man 
who had made some money by trading, and when 
the father died the property was divided according 
to law between the girl and her brother. She was 
a little heiress in her way, owning a garden, where 
grew many fruit-trees, and a piece of rice land. She 
had also a share in a little shop which she managed, 
and she had many gold bracelets and fine diamond 
earrings. She was much wooed by the young men 
about there, and at last she married. He was a 
young man, good-looking, a sergeant of police, and 
for a time they were very happy. And then trouble 
came. The husband took to bad ways. The know- 
ledge that he could get money for nothing was too 
much for him. He drank and he wasted her money, 
and he neglected his work, and at last he was 
dismissed from government employ. And his wife 
got angry with him, and complained of him to the 
neighbours ; and made him worse, though she was 
at heart a good girl. Quickly he went from bad 
to worse, until in a very short time, six months, 
I think, he had spent half her little fortune. Then 
she began to limit supplies — the husband did no 
work at all — and in consequence he began to neglect 
her ; they had many quarrels, and her tongue was 
sharp, and matters got worse and worse until they 



214 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

were the talk of the village. All attempts of the 
headman and elders to restrain him were useless. 
He became quarrelsome, and went on from one 
thing to another, until at last he was suspected of 
being concerned in a crime. So then when all means 
had failed to restore her husband to her, when they 
had drifted far apart and there was nothing before 
them but trouble, she went to the elders of the 
village and demanded a divorce. And the elders 
granted it to her. Her husband objected ; he did 
not want to be divorced. He claimed this, and he 
claimed that, but it was all of no use. So the tie 
that had united them was dissolved, as the love had 
been dissolved long before, and they parted. The 
man went away to Lower Burma. They tell me he 
has become a cultivator and has reformed, and is 
doing well ; and the girl is ready to marry again. 
Half her property is gone, but half remains, and she 
has still her little business. I think they will both 
do well. But if they had been chained together, 
what then ? 

You see that divorce is free. Anyone can obtain 
it by appearing before the elders of the village and 
demanding it. A writing of divorcement is made 
out, and the parties are free. Each retains his or 
her own property, and that earned during marriage 
is divided ; only that the party claiming the divorce 
has to leave the house to the other — that is the only 
penalty, and it is not always enforced, unless the 
house be joint property. 

As religion has nothing to do with marriage, 
neither has it with divorce. Marriage is a status, 
a partnership, nothing more. But it is all that. 



XVII DIVORCE 215 

Divorce is a dissolution of that partnership. A 
Burman would not ask, * Were they married ? ' but, 
* Are they man and wife ? ' And so with divorce, it 
is a cessation of the state of marriage. 

Elders tell me that women ask for divorce far 
more than men do. ' Men have patience, and women 
have not,' that is what they say. For every little 
quarrel a woman will want a divorce. * Thakin, 
if we were to grant divorces every time a woman 
came and demanded it, we should be doing nothing 
else all day long. If a husband comes home to 
find dinner not cooked, and speaks angrily, his wife 
will rush to us in tears for a divorce. If he speaks 
to another woman and smiles, if he does not give 
his wife a new dress, if he be fond of going out 
in the evening, all these are reasons for a breathless 
demand for a divorce. The wives get cross and 
run to us and cry, " My husband has been angry 
with me. Never will I live with him again. Give 
me a divorce." Or, " See my clothes, how old they 
are. I cannot buy any new dress. I will have a 
divorce." And we say, " Yes, yes ; it is very sad. 
Of course, you must have a divorce ; but we cannot 
give you one to-night. Go away, and come again 
in three days or in four days, when we have more 
time." And they go away, thakin, and they do 
not return. Next day it is all forgotten. You 
see, they don't know what they want ; they turn 
with the wind — they have no patience.' 

Sometimes they repent too late. Here is another 
of my memories about divorce : 

There was a man and his wife, cultivators, living 
in a small village. The land that he cultivated 



2i6 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

belonged to his wife, for she had inherited it from 
her father, together with a house and a little money. 
The man had nothing when he married her, but he 
was hardworking and honest and good-tempered, 
and they kept themselves going comfortably enough. 
But he had one fault : every now and then he would 
drink too much. This was in Lower Burma, where 
liquor shops are free to Burmans. In Upper Burma 
no liquor can be sold to them. He did not drink 
often. He was a teetotaler generally ; but once a 
month, or once in two months, he would meet some 
friends, and they would drink in good fellowship, 
and he would return home drunk. His wife felt this 
very bitterly, and when he would come into the 
house, his eyes red and his face swollen, she would 
attack him with bitter words, as women do. She 
would upbraid him for his conduct, she would point 
at him the finger of scorn, she would tell him in 
biting words that he was drinking the produce of 
her fields, of her inheritance ; she would even im- 
pute to him, in her passion, worse things than these, 
things that were not true. And the husband was 
usually good-natured, and admitted his wrong, and 
put up with all her abuse, and they lived happily till 
the next time. 

After this had been going on for a few years, 
instead of getting accustomed to her husband, instead 
of seeing that if he had this fault he had many 
virtues, and that he was just as good a husband as 
she was a wife, or perhaps better, her anger against 
him increased every time, till now she would declare 
that she would abide it no longer, that he was past 
endurance, and she would have a divorce ; and 



XVII DIVORCE 217 

several times she even ran to the elders to demand 
it. But the elders would put it by. ' Let it wait/ 
they said, * for a few days, and then we will see ' ; 
and by that time all was soothed down again. But 
at last the end came. One night she passed all 
bounds in her anger, using words that could never 
be forgiven ; and when she declared as usual that 
she must have a divorce, her husband said : ' Yes, 
we will divorce. Let there be an end of it.' And 
so next day they went to the elders both of them, 
and as both demanded the divorce, the elders could 
not delay very long. A few days' delay they made, 
but the man was firm, and at last it was done. 
They were divorced. I think the woman would 
have drawn back at the last moment, but she could 
not, for very shame, and the man never wavered. 
He was offended past forgiveness. 

So the divorce was given, and the man left the 
house and went to live elsewhere. 

In a few days — a very few days — the wife sent 
for him again. * Would he return ? ' And he 
refused. Then she went to the headman and asked 
him to make it up, and the headman sent for the 
husband, who came. 

The woman asked her husband to return. 

' Come back,' she said, ' come back. I have been 
wrong. Let us forgive. It shall never happen again.' 

The man shook his head. 

* No,' he said ; * a divorce is a divorce. I do not 
care to marry and divorce once a week. You were 
always saying, " I will divorce you, I will divorce 
you." Now it is done. Let it remain.' 

The woman was struck with grief. 



21 8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

* I did not know/ she said ; * I was hot-tempered. 
I was foolish. But now I know. Ah ! the house 
is so lonely ! I have but two ears, I have but two 
eyes, and the house is so large.* 

But the husband refused again. 

* What is done, is done. Marriage is not to be 
taken off and put on like a jacket. I have made up 
my mind.' 

Then he went away, and after a little the woman 
went away too. She went straight to the big, 
lonely house, and there she hanged herself. 

You see, she loved him all the time, but did not 
know till too late. 

Men do not often apply for divorce except for 
very good cause, and with their minds fully made 
up to obtain it. They do obtain it, of course. 

With this facility for divorce, it is remarkable how 
uncommon it is. In the villages and amongst 
respectable Burmans in all classes of life it is a great 
exception to divorce or to be divorced. The only 
class amongst whom it is at all common is the class 
of hangers-on to our Administration, the clerks and 
policemen, and so on. I fear there is little that is 
good to be said of many of them. It is terrible to 
see how demoralizing our contact is to all sorts and 
conditions of men. To be attached to our Adminis- 
tration is almost a stigma of disreputableness. I 
remember remarking once to a headman that a 
certain official seemed to be quite regardless of 
public opinion in his life, and asked him if the 
villagers did not condemn him. And the headman 
answered with surprise : ' But he is an official ' ; as 
if officials were quite sitper grammaticam of morals. 



XVII DIVORCE 219 

Yet this is the class from whom we most of us 
obtain our knowledge of Burmese life, whom we see 
most of, whose opinions we accept as reflecting the 
truth of Burmese thought. No wonder we are so 
often astray. 

Amongst these, the taking of second, and even 
third, wives is not at all uncommon, and naturally 
divorce often follows. Among the great mass of 
the people it is very uncommon. I cannot give any 
figures. There are no records kept of marriage or 
of divorce. What the proportion is it is impossible 
to even guess. I have heard all sorts of estimates, 
none founded on more than imagination. I have 
even tried to find out in small villages what the 
number of divorces were in a year, and tried to 
estimate from this the percentage. I made it from 
2 to 5 per cent of the marriages. But I cannot offer 
these figures as correct for any large area. Probably 
they vary from place to place and from year to year. 
In the old time the queen was very strict upon the 
point. As she would allow no other wife to her 
king, so she would allow no taking of other wives, 
no abuse of divorce among her subjects. Whatever 
her influence may have been in other ways, here it 
was all for good. But the queen has gone, and there 
is no one left at all. No one but the hangers-on of 
whom I have spoken, examples not to be followed, 
but to be shunned. 

But of this there is no manner of doubt, that this 
freedom of marriage and divorce leads to no license. 
There is no confusion between marriage or non- 
marriage, and even yet public opinion is a very great 
check upon divorce. It is not considered right to 



220 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

divorce your husband or your wife without good — 
very good and sufficient cause. And what is good 
and sufficient cause is very well understood. That 
a woman should have a nagging tongue, that a man 
should be a drunkard, what could be better cause 
than this ? The gravity of the offence lies in whether 
it makes life unbearable together, not in the name 
you may give it. 

The facility for divorce has other effects too. It 
makes a man and a woman very careful in their 
behaviour to each other. The chain that binds them 
is a chain of mutual forbearance, of mutual endur- 
ance, of mutual love ; and if these be broken, then 
is the bond gone. Marriage is no fetter about a 
man or woman, binding both to that which they may 
get to hate. 

In the first Burmese war in 1825 there was a 
man, an Englishman, taken prisoner in Ava and put 
in prison, and there he found certain Europeans and 
Americans. And after a time, for fear of attempts 
at escape, these prisoners were chained together two 
and two. And he tells you, this Englishman, how 
terrible this was, and of the hate and repulsion that 
arose in your heart to your co-bondsman. Before 
they were chained together they lived in close neigh- 
bourhood, in peace and amity ; but when the chains 
came it was far otherwise, though they were no nearer 
than before. They got to hate each other. 

And this is the Burmese idea of marriage, that 
it is a partnership of love and affection, and that 
when these die, all should be over. An unbreakable 
marriage appears to them as a fetter, a bond, some- 
thing hateful and hate inspiring. You see, they are 



XVII DIVORCE 221 

a people who love to be free : they hate bonds and 
dogmas of every description. It is always religion 
that has made a bond of marriage, and here religion 
has not interfered. Theirs is a religion of free men 
and free women. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

MANNERS 

' Not where others fail, or do, or leave undone — the wise should 
notice what himself has done, or left undone.' — Dammapada. 

A REMARKABLE trait of the Burmese character is 
their unwillingness to interfere in other people's 
affairs. Whether it arises from their religion of 
self-culture or no, I cannot say, but it is in full 
keeping with it. Every man's acts and thoughts 
are his own affair, think the Burmans ; each man is 
free to go his own way, to think his own thoughts, 
to act his own acts, as long as he does not too much 
annoy his neighbours. Each man is responsible for 
himself and for himself alone, and there is no need 
for him to try and be guardian also to his fellows. 
And so the Burman likes to go his own way, to be 
a free man within certain limits ; and the freedom 
that he demands for himself, he will extend also 
to his neighbours. He has a very great and wide 
tolerance towards all his neighbours, not thinking 
it necessary to disapprove of his neighbours' acts 
because they may not be the same as his own, 
never thinking it necessary to interfere with his 

222 



CH. XVIII MANNERS 223 

neighbours as long as the laws are not broken. Our 
ideas that what habits are different to our habits 
must be wrong, and being wrong, require correction 
at our hands, is very far from his thoughts. He 
never desires to interfere with anyone. Certain as 
he is that his own ideas are best, he is contented 
with that knowledge, and is not ceaselessly desirous 
of proving it upon other people. And so a foreigner 
may go and live in a Burman village, may settle 
down there and live his own life and follow his own 
customs in perfect freedom, may dress and eat and 
drink and pray and die as he likes. No one will 
interfere. No one will try and correct him ; no one 
will be for ever insisting to him that he is an outcast, 
either from civilization or from religion. The people 
will accept him for what he is, and leave the matter 
there. If he likes to change his ways and conform 
to Burmese habits and Buddhist forms, so much the 
better ; but if not, never mind. 

It is, I think, a great deal owing to this habit of 
mind that the manners of the Burmese are usually 
so good, children in civilization as they are. There 
is amongst them no rude inquisitiveness and no 
desire to in any way circumscribe your freedom, by 
either remark or act. Surely of all things that cause 
trouble, nothing is so common amongst us as the 
interference with each other's ways, as the needless 
giving of advice. It seems to each of us that we 
are responsible, not only for ourselves, but also for 
everyone else near us ; and so if we disapprove of 
any act, we are always in a hurry to express our dis- 
approval and to try and persuade the actor to our 
way of thinking. We are for ever thinking of others 



224 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and trying to improve them ; as a nation we try to 
coerce weaker nations and to convert stronger ones, 
and as individuals we do the same. We are sure 
that other people cannot but be better and happier 
for being brought into our ways of thinking, by force 
even, if necessary. We call it philanthropy. 

But the Buddhist does not believe this at all. 
Each man, each nation has, he thinks, enough to do 
managing his or its own affairs. Interference, any 
sort of interference, he is sure can do nothing but 
harm. You cannot save a man. He can save him- 
self; you can do nothing for him. You may force 
or persuade him into an outer agreement with you, 
but what is the value of that ? All dispositions that 
are good, that are of any value at all, must come 
spontaneously from the heart of man. First, he 
must desire them, and then struggle to obtain them ; 
by this means alone can any virtue be reached. 
This, which is the key of his religion, is the key 
also of his private life. Each man is a free man 
to do what he likes, in a way that we have never 
understood. 

Even under the rule of the Burmese kings there 
was the very widest tolerance. You never heard of 
a foreigner being molested in any way, being for- 
bidden to live as he liked, being forbidden to erect 
his own places of worship. He had the widest free- 
dom, as long as he infringed no law. The Burmese 
rule may not have been a good one in many ways, 
but it was never guilty of persecution, of any attempt 
at forcible conversion, of any desire to make such an 
attempt. 

This tolerance, this inclination to let each man 



XVIII MANNERS 225 

go his own way, is conspicuous even down to the 
little events of life. It is very marked, even in con- 
versation, how little criticism is indulged in towards 
each other, how there is an absolute absence of desire 
to proselytize each other in any way. ' It is his 
way,' they will say, with a laugh, of any peculiar 
act of any person ; * it is his way. What does it 
matter to us ? ' Of all the lovable qualities of 
the Burmese, and they are many, there are none 
greater than these — their light-heartedness and their 
tolerance. 

A Burman will always assume that you know 
your own business, and will leave you alone to do 
it. How great a boon this is I think we hardly can 
understand, for we have none of it. And he carries 
it to an extent that sometimes surprises us. 

Suppose you are walking along a road and there 
is a broken bridge on the way, a bridge that you 
might fall through. No one will try and prevent 
you going. Any Burman who saw you go will, if 
he think at all about it, give you the credit for 
knowing what you are about. It will not enter into 
his head to go out of his way to give you advice 
about that bridge. If you ask him he will help you 
all he can, but he will not volunteer ; and so if you 
depend on volunteered advice, you may fall through 
the bridge and break your neck, perhaps. 

At first this sort of thing seems to us to spring 
from laziness or from discourtesy. It is just the 
reverse of this latter ; it is excess of courtesy that 
assumes you to be aware of what you are about, and 
capable of judging properly. 

You may get yourself into all sorts of trouble, 

Q 



226 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and unless you call out no one will assist you. They 
will suppose that if you require help you will soon 
ask for it. You could drift all the way from Bhamo 
to Rangoon on a log, and I am sure no one would 
try to pick you up unless you shouted for help. 
Let anyone try to drift down from Oxford to Rich- 
mond, and he will be forcibly saved every mile of 
his journey, I am sure. The Burman boatmen you 
passed would only laugh and ask how you were 
getting on. The English boatman would have you 
out of that in a jiffy, saving you despite yourself 
You might commit suicide in Burma, and no one 
would stop you. ' It is your own look-out,' they 
would say ; ' if you want to die why should we 
prevent you ? What business is it of ours ? ' 

Never believe for a moment that this is cold- 
heartedness. Nowhere is there any man so kind- 
hearted as a Burman, so ready to help you, so 
hospitable, so charitable both in act and thought. 

It is only that he has another way of seeing these 
things to what we have. He would resent as the 
worst discourtesy that which we call having a friendly 
interest in each other's doings. Volunteered advice 
comes, so he thinks, from pure self-conceit, and is 
intolerable ; help that he has not asked for conveys 
the assumption that he is a fool, and the helper ever 
so much wiser than he. It is in his eyes simply a 
form of self-assertion, an attempt at governing other 
people, an infringement of good manners not to be 
borne. 

Each man is responsible for himself, each man is 
the maker of himself Only he can do himself good 
by good thought, by good acts ; only he can hurt 



XVIII MANNERS 227 

himself by evil intentions and deeds. Therefore 
in your intercourse with others remember always 
yourself, remember that no one can injure you but 
yourself; be careful, therefore, of your acts for your 
own sake. For if you lose your temper, who is the 
sufferer ? Yourself ; no one but yourself. If you 
are guilty of disgraceful acts, of discourteous words, 
who suffers ? Yourself. Remember that ; remember 
that courtesy and good temper are due from you to 
everyone. What does it matter who the other person 
be ? you should be courteous to him, not because he 
deserves it, but because you deserve it. Courtesy 
is measured by the giver, not by the receiver. We 
are apt sometimes to think that this continual care 
of self is selfishness ; it is the very reverse. Self- 
reverence is the antipode of self-conceit, of selfish- 
ness. If you honour yourself, you will be careful 
that nothing dishonourable shall come from you. 
' Self- reverence, self-knowledge, self-control'; we, 
too, have had a poet who taught this. 

And so dignity of manner is very marked amongst 
this people. It is cultivated as a gift, as the outward 
sign of a good heart. 

* A rough diamond ' ; no Burman would under- 
stand this saying. The value of a diamond is that 
it can be polished. As long as it remains in the 
rough, it has no more beauty than a lump of mud. 
If your heart be good, so, too, will be your manners. 
A good tree will bring forth good fruit. If the fruit 
be rotten, can the tree be good? Not so. If your 
manners are bad, so, too, is your heart. To be 
courteous, even-tempered, to be tolerant and full 
of sympathy, these are the proofs of an inward 



228 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xviii 

goodness. You cannot have one without the other. 
Outward appearances are not deceptive, but are 
true. 

Therefore they strive after even temper. Hot- 
tempered as they are, easily aroused to wrath, easily 
awakened to pleasure, men with the passions of a 
child, they have very great command over them- 
selves. They are ashamed of losing their temper ; 
they look upon it as a disgrace. We are often 
proud of it ; we think sometimes we do well to be 
angry. 

And so they are very patient, very long-suffering, 
accepting with resignation the troubles of this world, 
the kicks and spurns of fortune, secure in this, that 
each man's self is in his own keeping. If there be 
trouble for to-day, what can it matter if you do but 
command yourself? If others be discourteous to 
you, that cannot hurt you, if you do not allow your- 
self to be discourteous in return. Take care of your 
own soul, sure that in the end you will win, either 
in this life or in some other, that which you deserve. 
What you have made your soul fit for, that you will 
obtain, sooner or later, whether it be evil or whether 
it be good. The law of righteousness is for ever 
this, that what a man deserves that he will obtain. 
And so in the end, if you cultivate your soul with 
unwearying patience, striving always after what is 
good, purifying yourself from the lust of life, you 
will come unto that lake where all desire shall be 
washed away. 



CHAPTER XIX 

'NOBLESSE oblige' 

* Sooner shall the cleft rock reunite so as to make a whole, than 
may he who kills any living being be admitted into our society.' — 
Acceptance into the Monkhood. 

It is very noticeable throughout the bazaars of 
Burma that all the beef butchers are natives of 
India. No Burman will kill a cow or a bullock, 
and no Burman will sell its meat. It is otherwise 
with pork and fowls. Burmans may sometimes be 
found selling these ; and fish are almost invariably 
sold by the wives of the fishermen. During the 
king's time, any man who was even found in 
possession of beef was liable to very severe punish- 
ment. The only exception, as I have explained 
elsewhere, was in the case of the queen when ex- 
pecting an addition to her family, and it was neces- 
sary that she should be strengthened in all ways. 
None, not even foreigners, were allowed to kill beef, 
and this law was very stringently observed. Other 
flesh and fish might, as far as the law of the country 
went, be sold with impunity. You could not be 
fined for killing and eating goats, or fowls, or pigs, 

229 



230 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and these were sold occasionally. It is ten years 
since King Thibaw was overthrown, and there is 
now no law against the sale of beef. And yet, 
as I have said, no respectable Burman will even 
now kill or sell beef. The law was founded on the 
beliefs of the people, and though the law is dead, 
the beliefs remain. 

It is true that the taking of life is against 
Buddhist commands. No life at all may be taken 
by him who adheres to Buddhistic teaching. Neither 
for sport, nor for revenge, nor for food, may any 
animal be deprived of the breath that is in it. 
And this is a command wonderfully well kept. 
There are a few exceptions, but they are known 
and accepted as breaches of the law, for the law 
itself knows no exceptions. Fish, as I have said, 
can be obtained almost everywhere. They are 
caught in great quantities in the river, and are sold 
in most bazaars, either fresh or salted. It is one of 
the staple foods of the Burmese. But although they 
will eat fish, they despise the fisherman. Not so 
much, perhaps, as if he killed other living things, 
but still, the fisherman is an outcast from decent 
society. He will have to suffer great and terrible 
punishment before he can be cleansed from the sins 
that he daily commits. Notwithstanding this, there 
are many fishermen in Burma. 

A fish is a very cold-blooded beast. One must 
be very hard up for something to love to have any 
affection to spare upon fishes. They cannot be, or 
at all events they never are, domesticated, and 
most of them are not beautiful. I am not aware 
that they have ever been known to display any 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 2^1 

attachment to anyone, which accounts, perhaps, for 
the comparatively lenient eye with which their 
destruction is contemplated. 

For with warm - blooded animals it is very 
different. Cattle, as I have said, can never be 
killed nor their meat sold by a Burman, and with 
other animals the difficulty is not much less. 

I was in Upper Burma for some months before 
the war, and many a time I could get no meat at all. 
Living in a large town among prosperous people, 
I could get no flesh at all, only fish and rice and 
vegetables. When, after much trouble, my Indian 
cook would get me a few fowls, he would often 
be waylaid and forced to release them. An old 
woman, say, anxious to do some deed of merit, 
would come to him as he returned triumphantly 
home with his fowls and tender him money, and 
beg him to release the fowls. She would give the 
full price or double the price of the fowls ; she had 
no desire to gain merit at another person's expense, 
and the unwilling cook would be obliged to give up 
the fowls. Public opinion was so strong he dare 
not refuse. The money was paid, the fowls set 
free, and I dined on tinned beef 

And yet the villages are full of fowls. Why 
they are kept I do not know. Certainly not for 
food. I do not mean to say that an accidental 
meeting between a rock and a fowl may not occa- 
sionally furnish forth a dinner, but this is not the 
object with which they are kept — of this 1 am sure. 

You would not suppose that fowls were capable 
of exciting much affection, yet I suppose they are. 
Certainly in one case ducks were. There is a 



232 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Burman lady I know who is married to an English- 
man. He kept ducks. He bought a number of 
ducklings, and had them fed up so that they might 
be fat and succulent when the time came for them 
to be served at table. They became very fine 
ducks, and my friend had promised me one. I 
took an interest in them, and always noticed their 
increasing fatness when I rode that way. Imagine, 
then, my disappointment when one day I saw that 
all the ducks had disappeared. 

I stopped to inquire. Yes, truly they were all 
gone, my friend told me. In his absence his wife 
had gone up the river to visit some friends, and had 
taken the ducks with her. She could not bear, she 
said, that they should be killed, so she took them 
away and distributed them among her friends, one 
here and one there, where she was sure they would 
be well treated and not killed. When she returned 
she was quite pleased at her success, and laughed at 
her husband and me. 

This same lady was always terribly distressed 
when she had to order a fowl to be killed for her 
husband's breakfast, even if she had never seen it 
before. I have seen her, after telling the cook to 
kill a fowl for breakfast, run away and sit down in 
the veranda with her hands over her ears, and her 
face the very picture of misery, fearing lest she 
should hear its shrieks. I think that this was the 
one great trouble to her in her marriage, that her 
husband would insist on eating fowls and ducks, 
and that she had to order them to be killed. 

And as she is, so are most Burmans? If there 
is all this trouble about fowls, it can be imagined 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 233 

how the trouble increases when it comes to goats or 
any larger beasts. In the jungle villages meat of 
any kind at all is never seen : no animals of any 
kind are allowed to be killed. An officer travelling 
in the district would be reduced to what he could 
carry with him, if it were not for an Act of Govern- 
ment obliging villages to furnish — on payment, of 
course — supplies for officers and troops passing 
through. The mere fact of such a law being neces- 
sary is sufficient proof of the strength of the feeling 
against taking life. 

Of course, all shooting, either for sport or for 
food, is looked upon as disgraceful. In many 
jungle villages where deer abound there are one or 
two hunters who make a living by hunting. But 
they are disgraced men. They are worse than 
fishermen, and they will have a terrible penalty to 
pay for it all. It will take much suffering to wash 
from their souls the cruelty, the blood-thirstiness, 
the carelessness to suffering, the absence of com- 
passion, that hunting must produce. ' Is there no 
food in the bazaar, that you must go and take the 
lives of animals ? ' has been said to me many a time. 
And when my house-roof was infested by sparrows, 
who dropped grass and eggs all over my rooms, so 
that I was obliged to shoot them with a little rifle, 
this was no excuse. * You should have built a 
sparrow-cote,' they told me. * If you had built a 
sparrow-cote, they would have gone away and left 
you in peace. They only wanted to make nests 
and lay eggs and have little ones, and you went 
and shot them.' There are many sparrow-cotes to 
be seen in the villages. 



234 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

I might give example after example of this sort, 
for they happen every day. We who are meat- 
eaters, who delight in shooting, who have a horror 
of insects and reptiles, are continually coming into 
collision with the principles of our neighbours ; for 
even harmful reptiles they do not care to kill. 
Truly I believe it is a myth, the story of the 
Burmese mother courteously escorting out of the 
house the scorpion which had just bitten her baby. 
A Burmese mother worships her baby as much as 
the woman of any other nation does, and I believe 
there is no crime she would not commit in its 
behalf. But if she saw a scorpion walking about 
in the fields, she would not kill it as we should. 
She would step aside and pass on. * Poor beast ! ' 
she would say, 'why should I hurt it? It never 
hurt me.' 

The Burman never kills insects out of sheer 
brutality. If a beetle drone annoyingly, he will 
catch it in a handkerchief and put it outside, and so 
with a bee. It is a great trouble often to get your 
Burmese servants to keep your house free of ants 
and other annoying creatures. If you tell them to 
kill the insects they will, for in that case the sin falls 
on you. Without special orders they would rather 
leave the ants alone. 

In the district in which I am now living snakes 
are very plentiful. There are cobras and keraits, 
but the most dreaded is the Russell's viper. He is 
a snake that averages from three to four feet long, 
and is very thick, with a big head and a stumpy 
tail. His body is marked very prettily with spots 
and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 235 

is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a 
dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsus- 
pectingly. Then he will bite you, and you die. He 
comes out usually in the evening before dark, and 
lies about on footpaths to catch the home-coming 
ploughman or reaper, and, contrary to the custom of 
other snakes, he will not flee on hearing a footstep. 
When anyone approaches he lies more still than 
ever, not even a movement of his head betraying 
him. He is so like the colour of the ground, he 
hopes he will be passed unseen ; and he is slow and 
lethargic in his movements, and so is easy to kill 
when once detected. As a Burman said, * If he 
sees you first, he kills you ; if you see him first, you 
kill him.' 

In this district no Burman hesitates a moment in 
killing a viper when he has the chance. Usually he 
has to do it in self-defence. This viper is terribly 
feared, as over a hundred persons a year die here 
by his bite. He is so hated and feared that he 
has become an outcast from the law that protects 
all life. 

But with other snakes it is not so. There is the 
hamadryad, for instance. He is a great snake about 
ten to fourteen feet long, and he is the only snake 
that will attack you first. He is said always to do 
so, certainly he often does. One attacked me once 
when out quail shooting. He put up his great neck 
and head suddenly at a distance of only five or six 
feet, and was just preparing to strike, when I liter- 
ally blew his head off with two charges of shot 

You would suppose he was vicious enough to be 
included with the Russell's viper in the category of 



236 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

the exceptions, but no. Perhaps he is too rare to 
excite such fierce and deadly hate as makes the 
Burman forget his law and kill the viper. However 
it may be, the Burman is not ready to kill the 
hamadryad. A few weeks ago a friend of mine and 
myself came across two little Burman boys carrying 
a jar with a piece of broken tile over it. The lads 
kept lifting up the tile and peeping in, and then 
putting the tile on again in a great hurry, and their 
actions excited our curiosity. So we called them to 
come to us, and we looked into the jar. It was full 
of baby hamadryads. The lads had found a nest of 
them in the absence of the mother, who would have 
killed them if she had been there, and had secured 
all the little snakes. There were seven of them. 

We asked the boys what they intended to do 
with the snakes, and they answered that they would 
show them to their friends in the village. 'And 
then ? ' we asked. And then they would let them 
go in the water. My friend killed all the hama- 
dryads on the spot, and gave the boys some coppers, 
and we went on. Can you imagine this happening 
anywhere else ? Can you think of any other school- 
boys sparing any animal they caught, much less 
poisonous snakes ? The extraordinary hold that 
this tenet of their religion has upon the Burmese 
must be seen to be understood. What I write will 
sound like some fairy story, I fear, to my people at 
home. It is far beneath the truth. The belief that 
it is wrong to take life is a belief with them as 
strong as any belief could be. I do not know any- 
where any command, earthly or heavenly, that is 
acted up to with such earnestness as this command 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 237 

is amongst the Burmese. It is an abiding principle 
of their daily life. 

Where the command came from I do not know. 
I cannot find any allusion to it in the life of the 
great teacher. We know that he ate meat. It 
seems to me that it is older even than he. It has 
been derived both by the Burmese Buddhists and 
the Hindus from a faith whose origin is hidden 
in the mists of long ago. It is part of that far 
older faith on which Buddhism was built, as was 
Christianity on Judaism. 

But if not part of his teaching — and though it 
is included in the sacred books, we do not know 
how much of them are derived from the Buddha 
himself — it is in strict accordance with all his 
teaching. That is one of the most wonderful points 
of Buddhism, it is all in accordance ; there are no 
exceptions. 

I have heard amongst Europeans a very curious 
explanation of this refusal of Buddhists to take life. 
' Buddhists,' they say, ' believe in the transmigration 
of souls. They believe that when a man dies his 
soul may go into a beast. You could not expect 
him to kill a bull, when perchance his grandfather's 
soul might inhabit there.' This is their explanation, 
this is the way they put two and two together to 
make five. They know that Buddhists believe in 
transmigration, they know that Buddhists do not 
like to take life, and therefore one is the cause of 
the other. 

I have mentioned this explanation to Burmans 
while talking of the subject, and they have always 
laughed at it. They had never heard of it before. 



238 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

It is true that it is part of their great theory of life 
that the souls of men have risen from being souls of 
beasts, and that we may so relapse if we are not 
careful. Many stones are told of cases that have 
occurred where a man has been reincarnated as an 
animal, and where what is now the soul of a man 
used to live in a beast. But that makes no differ- 
ence. Whatever a man may have been, or may be, 
he is a man now ; whatever a beast may have been, 
he is a beast now. Never suppose that a Burman 
has any other idea than this. To him men are 
men, and animals are animals, and men are far the 
higher. But he does not deduce from this that 
man's superiority gives him permission to illtreat or 
to kill animals. It is just the reverse. It is because 
man is so much higher than the animal that he can 
and must observe towards animals the very greatest 
care, feel for them the very greatest compassion, be 
good to them in every way he can. The Burman's 
motto should be Noblesse oblige ; he knows the 
meaning, if he knows not the words. 

For the Burman's compassion towards animals 
goes very much farther than a mere reluctance to 
kill them. Although he has no command on the 
subject, it seems to him quite as important to treat 
animals well during their lives as to refrain from 
taking those lives. His refusal to take life he shares 
with the Hindu ; his perpetual care and tenderness 
to all living creatures is all his own. And here I 
may mention a very curious contrast, that whereas 
in India the Hindu will not take life and the 
Mussulman will, yet the Mussulman is by reputation 
far kinder to his beasts than the Hindu. Here the 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 239 

Burman combines both qualities. He has all the 
kindness to animals that the Mahommedan has, and 
more, and he has the same horror of taking life that 
the Hindu has. 

Coming from half-starved, over-driven India, it 
is a revelation to see the animals in Burma. The 
village ponies and cattle and dogs in India are 
enough to make the heart bleed for their sordid 
misery, but in Burma they are a delight to the eye. 
They are all fat, every one of them — fat and com- 
fortable and impertinent ; even the ownerless dogs 
are well fed. I suppose the indifference of the 
ordinary native of India to animal suffering comes 
from the evil of his own lot. He is so very poor, 
he has such hard work to find enough for himself 
and his children, that his sympathy is all used up. 
He has none to spare. He is driven into a dumb 
heartlessness, for I do not think he is actually cruel. 

The Burman is full of the greatest sympathy 
towards animals of all kinds, of the greatest under- 
standing of their ways, of the most humorously 
good-natured attitude towards them. Looking at 
them from his manhood, he has no contempt for 
them ; but the gentle toleration of a father to very 
little children who are stupid and troublesome often, 
but are very lovable. He feels himself so far above 
them that he can condescend towards them, and 
forbear with them. 

His ponies are pictures of fatness and impertinence 
and go. They never have any vice because the 
Burman is never cruel to them ; they are never 
well trained, partly because he does not know how 
to train them, partly because they are so near the 



240 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

aboriginal wild pony as to be incapable of very 
much training. But they are willing ; they will go 
for ever, and are very strong, and they have admirable 
constitutions and tempers. You could not make a 
Burman ill-use his pony if you tried, and I fancy that 
to break these little half-wild ponies to go in cabs 
in crowded streets requires severe treatment. At 
least, I never knew but one hackney-carriage driver 
either in Rangoon or Mandalay who was a Burman, 
and he very soon gave it up. He said that the work 
was too heavy either for a pony or a man. I think, 
perhaps, it was for the safety of the public that he 
resigned, for his ponies were the very reverse of 
meek — which a native of India says a hackney- 
carriage pony should be — and he drove entirely by 
the light of Nature. 

So all the drivers of gharries, as we call them, are 
natives of India or half-breeds, and it is amongst 
them that the work of the Society for the Preven- 
tion of Cruelty to Animals principally lies. While 
I was in Rangoon I tried a number of cases of over- 
driving, of using ponies with sore withers and the 
like. I never tried a Burman. Even in Rangoon, 
which has become almost Indianized, his natural 
humanity never left the Burman. As far as Bur- 
mans are concerned, the Society for the Prevention 
of Cruelty to Animals need not exist. They are 
kinder to their animals than even the members of 
the Society could be. Instances occur every day ; 
here is one of the most striking that I remember. 

There is a town in Burma where there are some 
troops stationed, and which is the headquarters of 
the civil administration of the district. It is, or was 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 241 

then, some distance from a railway-station, and it 
was necessary to make some arrangement for the 
carriage of the mails to and from the town and 
station. The Post-office called for tenders, and at 
length it was arranged through the civil authorities 
that a coach should run once a day each way to 
carry the mails and passengers. A native of India 
agreed to take the contract — for Burmans seldom 
or never care to take them — and he was to comply 
with certain conditions and receive a certain subsidy. 
There was a great deal of traffic between the 
town and station, and it was supposed that the 
passenger traffic would pay the contractor well, apart 
from his mail subsidy. For Burmans are always 
free with their money, and the road was long and 
hot and dusty. I often passed that coach as I rode. 
I noticed that the ponies were poor, very poor, and 
were driven a little hard, but I saw no reason for 
interference. It did not seem to me that any cruelty 
was committed, nor that the ponies were actually 
unfit to be driven. I noticed that the driver used 
his whip a good deal, but then some ponies require 
the whip. I never thought much about it, as I 
always rode my own ponies, and they always shied 
at the coach, but I should have noticed if there had 
been anything remarkable. Towards the end of 
the year it became necessary to renew the contract, 
and the contractor was approached on the subject. 
He said he was willing to continue the contract for 
another year if the mail subsidy was largely increased. 
He said he had lost money on that year's working. 
When asked how he could possibly have lost con- 
sidering the large number of people who were always 

R 



242 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

passing up and down, he said that they did not ride 
in his coach. Only the European soldiers and a 
few natives of India came with him. Officers had 
their own ponies and rode, and the Burmans either 
hired a bullock-cart or walked. They hardly ever 
came in his coach, but he could not say what the 
reason might be. 

So an inquiry was made, and the Burmese were 
asked why they did not ride on the coach. Were 
the fares too high ? — was it uncomfortable ? But no, 
it was for neither of these reasons that they left the 
coach to the soldiers and natives of India. It was 
because of the ponies. No Burman would care to 
ride behind ponies who were treated as these ponies 
were — half fed, overdriven, whipped. It was a misery 
to see them ; it was twice a misery to drive behind 
them. * Poor beasts ! ' they said ; ' you can see their 
ribs, and when they come to the end of a stage they 
are fit to fall down and die. They should be turned 
out to graze.' 

The opinion was universal. The Burmans pre- 
ferred to spend twice or thrice the money and hire 
a bullock-cart and go slowly, while the coach flashed 
past them in a whirl ot dust, or they preferred to 
walk. Many and many times have I seen the road- 
side rest-houses full of travellers halting for a few 
minutes' rest. They walked while the coach came 
by empty ; and nearly all of them could have afforded 
the fare. It was a very striking instance of what 
pure kind-heartedness will do, for there would have 
been no religious command broken by going in the 
coach. It was the pure influence of compassion 
towards the beasts and refusal to be a party to such 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 243 

hard-heartedness. And yet, as I have said, I do 
not think the law could have interfered with success. 
Surely a people who could act like this, have the 
very soul of religion in their hearts, although the act 
was not done in the name of religion. 

All the animals — the cattle, the ponies, and the 
buffaloes — are so tame that it is almost an unknown 
thing for anyone to get hurt. 

The cattle are sometimes afraid of the white face 
and strange attire of a European, but you can walk 
through the herds as they come home in the evening 
with perfect confidence that they will not hurt you. 
Even a cow with a young calf will only eye you 
suspiciously ; and with the Burmans even the huge 
water buffaloes are absolutely tame. You can see 
a herd of these great beasts, with horns six feet 
across, come along under the command of a very 
small boy or girl perched on one of their broad 
backs. He flourishes a little stick, and issues his 
commands like a general. It is one of the quaintest 
imaginable sights to see this little fellow get off his 
steed, run after a straggler, and beat him with his 
stick. The buffalo eyes his master, whom he could 
abolish with one shake of his head, submissively, 
and takes the beating, which he probably feels about 
as much as if a straw fell on him, good-humouredly. 
The children never seem to come to grief. Buffaloes 
occasionally charge Europeans, but the only place 
where I have known of Burmans being killed by 
buffaloes is in the Kale Valley. There the 
buffaloes are turned out into the jungle for 
eight months in the year, and are only caught 
for ploughing and carting. Naturally they are 



244 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

quite wild ; in fact, many of them are the offspring 
of wild bulls. 

The Burmans, too, are very fond of dogs. Their 
villages are full of dogs ; but, as far as I know, they 
never use them for anything, and they are never 
trained to do anything. They are supposed to be 
useful as watch-dogs, but I do not think they are 
very good even at that I have surrounded a village 
before dawn and never a dog barked, and I have 
heard them bark all night at nothing. 

But when a Burman sees a fox-terrier or any 
English dog his delight is unfeigned. When we 
first took Upper Burma, and such sights were rare, 
half a village would turn out to see the little * tail- 
less ' dog trotting along after its master. And if the 
terrier would * beg,' then he would win all hearts. 
I am not only referring to children, but to grown 
men and women ; and then there is always some- 
thing peculiarly childlike and frank in these children 
of the great river. 

Only to-day, as I was walking very early up the 
bank of the river in the early dawn, I heard some 
Burman boatmen discussing my fox-terrier. They 
were about fifteen yards from the shore, poling their 
boat up against the current, which is arduous work. 
And as I passed them my little dog ran down the 
bank and looked at them across the water, and they 
saw her. 

' See now,' said one man to another, pausing for 
a moment with his pole in his hand — * see the little 
white dog with the brown face, how wise she looks ! ' 

* And how pretty ! ' said a man steering in the 
stern. * Come ! ' he cried, holding out his hand to it. 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE* 245 

But the dog only made a splash in the water 
with her paws, and then turned and ran after me. 
The boatmen laughed and resumed their poling, and 
I passed on. In the still morning across the still 
water I could hear every word, but I hardly took 
any note ; I have heard it so often. Only now when 
I come to write on this subject do I remember. 

It has been inculcated in us from childhood that 
it is a manly thing to be indifferent to pain — not to 
our own pain only, but to that of all others. To 
be sorry for a hunted hare, to compassionate the 
wounded deer, to shrink from torturing the brute 
creation, has been accounted by us as namby-pamby 
sentimentalism, not fit for man, fit only for a 
squeamish woman. To the Burman it is one of the 
highest of all virtues. He believes that all that is 
beautiful in life is founded on compassion and kind- 
ness and sympathy — that nothing of great value can 
exist without them. Do you think that a Burmese 
boy would be allowed to birds'-nest, or worry rats 
with a terrier, or go ferreting ? Not so ? These 
would be crimes. 

That this kindness and compassion for animals 
has very far-reaching results no one can doubt. If 
you are kind to animals, you will be kind, too, to 
your fellow-man. It is really the same thing, the 
same feeling in both cases. If to be superior in 
position to an animal justifies you in torturing it, so 
it would do with men. If you are in a better 
position than another man, richer, stronger, higher 
in rank, that would — that does often in our minds — 
justify ill-treatment and contempt. Our innate feel- 
ing towards all that we consider inferior to ourselves 



246 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

is scorn ; the Burman's is compassion. You can see 
this spirit coming out in every action of their daily 
life, in their dealings with each other, in their 
thoughts, in their speech. * You are so strong, have 
you no compassion for him who is weak, who is 
tempted, who has fallen ? ' How often have I heard 
this from a Burman's lips ! How often have I seen 
him act up to it ! It seems to them the necessary 
corollary of strength that the strong man should be 
sympathetic and kind. It seems to them an uncon- 
scious confession of weakness to be scornful, revenge- 
ful, inconsiderate. Courtesy, they say, is the mark 
of a great man, discourtesy of a little one. No one 
who feels his position secure will lose his temper, will 
persecute, will be disdainful. Their word for a fool 
and for a hasty-tempered man is the same. To 
them it is the same thing, one infers the other. And 
so their attitude towards animals is but an example 
of their attitude to each other. That an animal or 
a man should be lower and weaker than you is the 
strongest claim he can have on your humanity, and 
your courtesy and consideration for him is the 
clearest proof of your own superiority. And so in 
his dealings with animals the Buddhist considers 
himself, consults his own dignity, his own strength, 
and is kind and compassionate to them out of the 
greatness of his own heart. Nothing is more 
beautiful than the Burman in his ways with his 
children, and his beasts, with all who are lesser than 
himself. 

Even to us, who think so very differently from 
him on many points, there is a great and abiding 
charm in all this, to which we can find only one 



XIX 'NOBLESSE OBLIGE' 247 

exception ; for to our ideas there is one exception, 
and it is this : No Burman will take any life if he 
can help it, and therefore, if any animal injure itself, 
he will not kill it — not even to put it out of its pain, 
as we say. I have seen bullocks split on slippery 
roads, I have seen ponies with broken legs, I have 
seen goats with terrible wounds caused by accidental 
falls, and no one would kill them. If, when you are 
out shooting, your beaters pick up a wounded hare 
or partridge, do not suppose that they wring its 
neck ; you must yourself do that, or it will linger on 
till you get home. Under no circumstances will 
they take the life even of a wounded beast. And if 
you ask them, they will say : * If a man be sick, 
do you shoot him ? If he injure his spine so that 
he will be a cripple for life, do you put him out of 
his pain ? ' 

If you reply that men and beasts are different, 
they will answer that in this point they do not 
recognize the difference. ' Poor beast ! let him live 
out his little life.' And they will give him grass 
and water till he dies. 

This is the exception that I meant, but now, 
after I have written it, I am not so sure. Is it 
an exception ? 



CHAPTER XX 

ALL LIFE IS ONE 

* I heard a voice that cried, 
" Balder the Beautiful 
Is dead, is dead," 
And through the misty air 
Passed like the mournful cry 
Of sunward-sailing cranes.' 

Tegner's Drapa. 

All romance has died out of our woods and hills in 
England, all our fairies are dead long ago. Know- 
ledge so far has brought us only death. Later on it 
will bring us a new life. It is even now showing us 
how this may be, and is bringing us face to face 
again with Nature, and teaching us to know and 
understand the life that there is about us. Science 
is teaching us again what we knew long ago and 
forgot, that our life is not apart from the life about 
us, but of it. Everything is akin to us, and when 
we are more accustomed to this knowledge, when 
we have ceased to regard it as a new, strange teach- 
ing, and know that we are seeing again with clearer 
eyes what a half-knowledge blinded us to, then the 
world will be bright and beautiful to us again as it 
was long ago. 

248 



CH.xx ALL LIFE IS ONE 249 

But now all is dark. There are no dryads in our 
trees, nor nymphs among the reeds that fringe the 
river ; even our peaks hold for us no guardian spirit, 
that may take the reckless trespasser and bind him 
in a rock for ever. And because we have lost our 
belief in fairies, because we do not now think that 
there are goblins in our caves, because there is no 
spirit in the winds nor voice in the thunder, we have 
come to think that the trees and the rocks, the 
flowers and the storm, are all dead things. They 
are made up, we say, of materials that we know, 
they are governed by laws that we have discovered, 
and there is no life anywhere in Nature. 

And yet this cannot be true. Far truer is it to 
believe in fairies and in spirits than in nothing at 
all ; for surely there is life all about us. Who that 
has lived out alone in the forest, who that has lain 
upon the hillside and seen the mountains clothe 
themselves in lustrous shadows shot with crimson 
when the day dies, who that has heard the sigh 
come up out of the ravines where the little breezes 
move, who that has watched the trees sway their 
leaves to and fro, beckoning to each other with 
wayward amorous gestures, but has known that 
these are not dead things ? 

Watch the stream coming down the hill with a 
flash and a laugh in the sunlight, look into the dark 
brown pools in the deep shadows beneath the rocks, 
or voyage a whole night upon the breast of the 
great river, drifting past ghostly monasteries and 
silent villages, and then say if there be no life in 
the waters, if they, too, are dead things. There is 
no consolation like the consolation of Nature no 



250 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

sympathy like the sympathy of the hills and 
streams ; and sympathy comes from life. There is 
no sympathy with the dead. 

When you are alone in the forest all this life will 
come and talk to you, if you are quiet and under- 
stand. There is love deep down in the passionate 
heart of the flower, as there is in the little quivering 
honey-sucker flitting after his mate, as there was in 
Romeo long ago. There is majesty in the huge 
brown precipice greater than ever looked from the 
face of a king. All life is one. The soul that 
moves within you when you hear the deer call to 
each other far above you in the misty meadows of 
the night is the same soul that moves in everything 
about you. No people who have lived much with 
Nature have failed to descry this. They have recog- 
nized the life, they have felt the sympathy of the 
world about them, and to this life they have given 
names and forms as they would to friends whom 
they loved. Fairies and goblins, fauns and spirits, 
these are but names and personifications of a real 
life. But to him who has never felt this life, who 
has never been wooed by the trees and hills, these 
things are but foolishness, of course. 

To the Burman, not less than to the Greek of 
long ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the 
river and the mountains are full of spirits, whom the 
Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of Nats, 
good and bad, great and little, male and female, 
now living round about us. Some of them live in 
the trees, especially in the huge fig-tree that shades 
half an acre without the village ; or among the fern- 
like fronds of the tamarind ; and you will often see 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 251 

beneath such a tree, raised upon poles or nestled in 
the branches, a little house built of bamboo and 
thatch, perhaps two feet square. You will be told 
when you ask that this is the house of the Tree- 
Nat. Flowers will be offered sometimes, and a 
little water or rice maybe, to the Nat, never sup- 
posing that he is in need of such things, but as a 
courteous and graceful thing to do ; for it is not 
safe to offend these Nats, and many of them are 
very powerful. There is a Nat of whom I know, 
whose home is in a great tree at the crossing of two 
roads, and he has a house there built for him, and 
he is much feared. He is such a great Nat that it 
is necessary when you pass his house to dismount 
from your pony and walk to a respectful distance. 
If you haughtily ride past trouble will befall you. 
A friend of mine riding there one day rejected all 
the advice of his Burmese companions and did not 
dismount, and a few days later he was taken deadly 
sick of fever. He very nearly died, and had to go 
away to the Straits for a sea-trip to take the fever 
out of his veins. It was a very near thing for him. 
That was in the Burmese times, of course. After 
that he always dismounted. But all Nats are not 
so proud nor so much to be feared as this one, and it 
is usually safe to ride past. 

Sometimes these Tree-Nats are given to throwing 
stones at houses near them, because they have taken 
a dislike to, or been insulted by, some dweller in the 
house. There is a lady I know who had a house in 
Maulmain, in the compound of which grew several 
magnificent trees, and Nats lived in them. For 
some reason or other these Nats took an enmity 



252 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

to the Burmese servant, and threw stones on the 
house, so that the lady and her husband could not 
sleep. For a time they could not discover the 
reason of this stone-throwing ; but when the servant 
went away for a few days and the stoning stopped, 
it became apparent what the cause was. Directly 
he returned the stone-throwing became worse than 
ever, and as no means, though many were tried, 
were effectual in stopping it, it was necessary at last 
to dismiss the lad. 

Even as I write, I am under the shadow of a tree 
where a Nat used to live, and the headman of the 
village has been telling me all about it. This is 
a government rest-house on a main road between 
two stations, and is built for government officials 
travelling on duty about their districts. To the 
west of it is a grand fig-tree of the kind called 
Nyaungbin by the Burmese. It is a very beautiful 
tree, though now a little bare, for it is just before 
the rains ; but it is a great tree even now, and two 
months hence it will be glorious. It was never 
planted, the headman tells me, but came up of itself 
very many years ago, and when it was grown to full 
size a Nat came to live in it. This was in the king's 
time, of course. The Nat lived in the tree for many 
years, and took great care of it. No one might 
injure it or any living creature near it, so jealous 
was the Nat of his abode. And the villagers built 
a little Nat-house, such as I have described, under 
the branches, and offered flowers and water, and all 
things went well with those who did well. But if 
anyone did ill the Nat punished him. If he cut the 
roots of the tree the Nat hurt his feet, and if he 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 253 

injured the branches the Nat injured his arms ; and 
if he cut the trunk the Nat came down out of the 
tree, and killed the sacrilegious man right off. There 
was no running away, because, as you know, the 
headman said, Nats can go a great deal faster than 
any man. Many men, careless strangers, who camped 
under the tree and then abused the hospitality of 
the Nat by hunting near his home, came to severe 
grief 

But the Nat has gone now, alas ! The tree is 
still there, but the Nat has fled away these many 
years. 

* I suppose he didn't care to stay,' said the 
headman. * You see that the English government 
officials came and camped here, and didn't fear the 
Nats. They had fowls killed here for their dinner, 
and they sang and shouted ; and they shot the green 
pigeons who ate his figs, and the little doves that 
nested in his branches.' 

All these things were an abomination to the Nat, 
who hated loud, rough talk and abuse, and to whom 
all life was sacred. 

So the Nat went away. The headman did not 
know where he was gone, but there are plenty of 
trees. 

' He has gone somewhere to get peace,' the head- 
man said. ' Somewhere in the jungle, where no one 
ever comes save the herd-boy and the deer, he will 
be living in a tree, though I do not think he will 
easily find a tree so beautiful as this.' 

The headman seemed very sorry about it, and 
so did several villagers who were with him ; and I 
suggested that if the Nat-houses were rebuilt, and 



254 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

flowers and water ofifered, the Nat might know and 
return. I even offered to contribute myself, that it 
might be taken as an amende honorable on behalf of 
the English government. But they did not think 
this would be any use. No Nat would come where 
there was so much going and coming, so little care 
for life, such a disregard for pity and for peace. If 
we were to take away our rest-house, well then, 
perhaps, after a time, something could be done, but 
not under present circumstances. 

And so, besides dethroning the Burmese king, 
and occupying his golden palace, we are ousting 
from their pleasant homes the guardian spirits of 
the trees. They flee before the cold materialism 
of our belief, before the brutality of our manners. 
The headman did not say this ; he did not mean 
to say this, for he is a very courteous man and a 
great friend of all of us ; but that is what it came 
to, I think. 

The trunk of this tree is more than ten feet 
through — not a round bole, but like the pillar in a 
Gothic cathedral, as of many smaller boles growing 
together ; and the roots spread out into a pedestal 
before entering the ground. The trunk does not 
go up very far. At perhaps twenty-five feet above 
the ground it divides into a myriad of smaller trunks, 
not branches, till it looks more like a forest than a 
single tree ; it is full of life still. Though the 
pigeons and the doves come here no longer, there 
are a thousand other birds flitting to and fro in their 
aerial city and chirping to each other. Two tiny 
squirrels have just run along a branch nearly over 
my head, in a desperate hurry apparently, their tails 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 255 

cocked over their backs, and a sky-blue chameleon 
is standing on the trunk near where it parts. There 
is always a breeze in this great tree ; the leaves are 
always moving, and there is a continuous rustle and 
murmur up there. A mango-tree and tamarind near 
by are quite still. Not a breath shakes their leaves ; 
they are as still as stone, but the shadow of the fig- 
tree is chequered with ever-changing lights. Is the 
Nat really gone ? Perhaps not ; perhaps he is still 
therej still caring for his tree, only shy now and 
distrustful, and therefore no more seen. 

Whole woods are enchanted sometimes, and no 
one dare enter them. Such a wood I know, far 
away north, near the hills, which is full of Nats. 
There was a great deal of game in it, for animals 
sought shelter there, and no one dared to disturb 
them ; nor the villagers to cut firewood, nor the 
girls seeking orchids, nor the hunter after his prey, 
dared to trespass upon that enchanted ground. 

' What would happen,' I asked once, * if anyone 
went into that wood? Would he be killed, or 
what ? ' 

And I was told that no one could tell what 
would happen, only that he would never be seen 
again alive. ' The Nats would confiscate him,' they 
said, ' for intruding on their privacy.' But what 
they would do to him after the confiscation no one 
seemed to be quite sure. I asked the official who 
was with me, a fine handsome Burman who had 
been with us in many fights, whether he would go 
into the wood with me, but he declined at once. 
Enemies are one thing, Nats are quite another, and 
a very much more dreadful thing. You can escape 



256 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

from enemies, as witness my companion, who had 
been shot at times without number and had only 
once been hit in the leg, but you cannot escape 
Nats. Once, he told me, there were two very 
sacrilegious men, hunters by profession, only more 
abandoned than even the majority of hunters, and 
they went into this wood to hunt. * They didn't 
care for Nats,' they said. They didn't care for 
anything at all apparently. ' They were absolutely 
without reverence, worse than any beast,' said my 
companion. 

So they went into the wood to shoot, and they 
never came out again. A few days later their bare 
bones were found, flung out upon the road near the 
enchanted wood. The Nats did not care to have 
even the bones of such scoundrels in their wood, 
and so thrust them out. That was what happened 
to them, and that was what might happen to us if 
we went in there. We did not go. 

Though the Nats of the forest will not allow even 
one of their beasts to be slain, the Nats of the rivers 
are not so exclusive. I do not think fish are ever 
regarded in quite the same light as animals. It is 
true that a fervent Buddhist will not kill even a fish, 
but a fisherman is not quite such a reprobate as a 
hunter in popular estimation. And the Nats think 
so, too, for the Nat of a pool will not forbid all 
fishing. You must give him his share ; you must 
be respectful to him, and not offend him ; and then 
he will fill your nets with gleaming fish, and all will 
go well with you. If not, of course, you will come 
to grief; your nets will be torn, and your boat upset ; 
and finally, if obstinate, you will be drowned. A 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 257 

great arm will seize you, and you will be pulled 
under and disappear for ever. 

A Nat is much like a human being ; if you treat 
him well he will treat you well, and conversely. 
Courtesy is never wasted on men or Nats, at least 
so a Burman tells me. 

The highest Nats live in the mountains. The 
higher the Nat the higher the mountain ; and when 
you get to a very high peak indeed, like Mainthong 
Peak in Wuntho, you encounter very powerful Nats. 

They tell a story of Mainthong Peak and the 
Nats there, how all of a sudden, one day in 1885, 
strange noises came from the hill. High up on his 
mighty side was heard the sound of great guns 
firing slowly and continuously; there was the thunder 
of falling rocks, cries as of someone bewailing a 
terrible calamity, and voices calling from the preci- 
pices. The people living in their little hamlets 
about his feet were terrified. Something they knew 
had happened of most dire import to them, some 
catastrophe which they were powerless to prevent, 
which they could not even guess. But when a few 
weeks later there came even into those remote 
villages the news of the fall of Mandalay, of the 
surrender of the king, of the ' great treachery,' they 
knew that this was what the Nats had been sorrow- 
ing over. All the Nats everywhere seem to have 
been distressed at our arrival, to hate our presence, 
and to earnestly desire our absence. They are the 
spirits of the country and of the people, and they 
cannot abide a foreign domination. 

But the greatest place for Nats is the Popa 
Mountain, which is an extinct volcano standing all 

S 



258 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

alone about midway between the river and the Shan 
Mountains. It is thus very conspicuous, having no 
hills near it to share its majesty ; and being in sight 
from all the old capitals, it is very well known in 
history and legend. It is covered with dense forest, 
and the villages close about are few. At the top 
there is a crater with a broken side, and a stream 
comes flowing out of this break down the mountain. 
Probably it was the denseness of its forests, the 
abundance of water, and its central position, more 
than its guardian Nats, that made it for so many 
years the last retreating -place of the half- robber, 
half-patriot bands that made life so uneasy for us. 
But the Nats of Popa Mountains are very famous. 

When any foreigner was taken into the service 
of the King of Burma he had to swear an oath of 
fidelity. He swore upon many things, and among 
them were included ' all the Nats in Popa.' No 
Burman would have dared to break an oath sworn 
in such a serious way as this, and they did not 
imagine that anyone else would. It was and is a 
very dangerous thing to offend the Popa Nats ; for 
they are still there in the mountain, and everyone 
who goes there must do them reverence. 

A friend of mine, a police officer who was en- 
gaged in trying to catch the last of the robber chiefs 
who hid near Popa, told me that when he went up 
the mountain shooting, he, too, had to make offer- 
ings. Some way up there is a little valley dark 
with overhanging trees, and a stream flows slowly 
along it. It is an enchanted valley, and if you look 
closely you will see that the stream is not as other 
streams, for it flows uphill. It comes rushing into 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 259 

the valley with a great display of foam and froth, 
and it leaves in a similar way, tearing down the 
rocks, and behaving like any other boisterous hill 
rivulet ; but in the valley itself it lies under a spell. 
It is slow and dark, and has a surface like a mirror, 
and it flows uphill. There is no doubt about it ; 
anyone can see it. When they came here, my 
friend tells me, they made a halt, and the Burmese 
hunters with him unpacked his breakfast. He did 
not want to eat then, he said, but they explained 
that it was not for him, but for the Nats. All his 
food was unpacked, cold chicken and tinned meats, 
and jam and eggs and bread, and it was spread 
neatly on a cloth under a tree. Then the hunters 
called upon the Nats to come and take anything 
they desired, while my friend wondered what he 
should do if the Nats took all his food and left 
him with nothing. But no Nats came, although the 
Burmans called again and again. So they packed 
up the food, saying that now the Nats would be 
pleased at the courtesy shown to them, and that my 
friend would have good sport. Presently they went 
on, leaving, however, an egg or two and a little salt, 
in case the Nats might be hungry later, and true 
enough it was that they did have good luck. At 
other times, my friend says, when he did not observe 
this ceremony, he saw nothing to shoot at all, but on 
this day he did well. 

The former history of all Nats is not known. 
Whether they have had a previous existence in 
another form, and if so, what, is a secret that they 
usually keep carefully to themselves, but the history 
of the Popa Nats is well known. Everyone who 



26o THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

lives near the great hill can tell you that, for it all 
happened not so long ago. How long exactly no 
one can say, but not so long that the details of the 
story have become at all clouded by the mists of 
time. 

They were brother and sister, these Popa Nats, 
and they had lived away up North. The brother 
was a blacksmith, and he was a very strong man. 
He was the strongest man in all the country ; the 
blow of his hammer on the anvil made the earth 
tremble, and his forge was as the mouth of hell. 
No one was so much feared and so much sought 
after as he. And as he was strong, so his sister 
was beautiful beyond all the maidens of the time. 
Their father and mother were dead, and there was 
no one but those two, the brother and sister, so they 
loved each other dearly, and thought of no one else. 
The brother brought home no wife to his house by 
the forge. He wanted no one while he had his 
sister there, and when lovers came wooing to her, 
singing amorous songs in the amber dusk, she would 
have nothing to do with them. So they lived there 
together, he growing stronger and she more beautiful 
every day, till at last a change came. 

The old king died, and a new king came to 
the throne, and orders were sent about to all the 
governors of provinces and other officials that the 
most beautiful maidens were to be sent down to the 
Golden City to be wives to the great king. So 
the governor of that country sent for the blacksmith 
and his sister to his palace, and told them there 
what orders he had received, and asked the black- 
smith to give his sister that she might be sent as 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 261 

queen to the king. We are not told what argu- 
ments the governor used to gain his point, but only 
this, that when he failed, he sent the girl in unto his 
wife, and there she was persuaded to go. There 
must have been something very tempting, to one 
who was but a village girl, in the prospect of being 
even one of the lesser queens, of living in the palace, 
the centre of the world. So she consented at last, 
and her brother consented, and the girl was sent 
down under fitting escort to find favour in the eyes 
of her king. But the blacksmith refused to go. It 
was no good the governor saying such a great man 
as he must come to high honour in the Golden City, 
it was useless for the girl to beg and pray him to 
come with her — he always refused. So she sailed 
away down the great river, and the blacksmith 
returned to his forge. 

As the governor had said, the girl was acceptable 
in the king's sight, and she was made at last one of 
the principal queens, and of all she had most power 
over the king. They say she was most beautiful, 
that her presence was as soothing as shade after 
heat, that her form was as graceful as a young tree, 
and the palms of her hands were like lotus blossoms. 
She had enemies, of course. Most of the other 
queens were her enemies, and tried to do her harm. 
But it was useless telling tales of her to the king, 
for the king never believed ; and she walked so 
wisely and so well, that she never fell into any 
snare. But still the plots never ceased. 

There was one day when she was sitting alone in 
the garden pavilion, with the trees making moving 
shadows all about her, that the king came to her. 



262 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

They talked for a time, and the king began to 
speak to her of her Hfe before she came to the 
palace, a thing he had never done before. But he 
seemed to know all about it, nevertheless, and he 
spoke to her of her brother, and said that he, the 
king, had heard how no man was so strong as this 
blacksmith, the brother of the queen. The queen 
said it was true, and she talked on and on and 
praised her brother, and babbled of the days of 
her childhood, when he carried her on his great 
shoulder, and threw her into the air, catching her 
again. She was delighted to talk of all these 
things, and in her pleasure she forgot her discretion, 
and said that her brother was wise as well as strong, 
and that all the people loved him. Never was there 
such a man as he. The king did not seem very 
pleased with it all, but he said only that the black- 
smith was a great man, and that the queen must 
write to him to come down to the city, that the 
king might see him of whom there was such great 
report. 

Then the king got up and went away, and the 
queen began to doubt ; and the more she thought 
the more she feared she had not been acting wisely 
in talking as she did, for it is not wise to praise 
anyone to a king. She went away to her own 
room to consider, and to try if she could hear of 
any reason why the king should act as he had done, 
and desire her brother to come to him to the city ; 
and she found out that it was all a plot of her 
enemies. Herself they had failed to injure, so they 
were now plotting against her through her brother. 
They had gone to the king, and filled his ear with 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 263 

slanderous reports. They had said that the queen's 
brother was the strongest man in all the kingdom. 
' He was cunning, too/ they said, * and very popular 
among all the people; and he was so puffed up with 
pride, now that his sister was a queen, that there 
was nothing he did not think he could do.' They 
represented to the king how dangerous such a man 
was in a kingdom, that it would be quite easy for 
him to raise such rebellion as the king could hardly 
put down, and that he was just the man to do such 
a thing. Nay, it was indeed proved that he must 
be disloyally plotting something, or he would have 
come down with his sister to the city when she 
came. But now many months had passed, and he 
never came. Clearly he was not to be trusted. 
Any other man whose sister was a queen would 
have come and lived in the palace, and served the 
king and become a minister, instead of staying up 
there and pretending to be a blacksmith. 

The king's mind had been much disturbed by 
this, for it seemed to him that it must be in part 
true ; and he went to the queen, as I have said, and 
his suspicions had not been lulled by what she told 
him, so he had ordered her to write to her brother 
to come down to the palace. 

The queen was terrified when she saw what a 
mistake she had made, and how she had fallen into 
the trap of her enemies ; but she hoped that the 
king would forget, and she determined that she 
would send no order to her brother to come. But 
the next day the king came back to the subject, 
and asked her if she had yet sent the letter, and 
she said * No ! ' The king was very angry at this 



264 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

disobedience to his orders, and he asked her how it 
came that she had not done as he had commanded, 
and sent a letter to her brother to call him to the 
palace. 

Then the queen fell at the king's feet and told 
him all her fears that her brother was sent for only 
to be imprisoned or executed, and she begged and 
prayed the king to leave him in peace up there in 
his village. She assured the king that he was loyal 
and good, and would do no evil. 

The king was rather abashed that his design had 
been discovered, but he was firm in his purpose. 
He assured the queen that the blacksmith should 
come to no harm, but rather good ; and he ordered 
the queen to obey him, threatening her that if she 
refused he would be sure that she was disloyal also, 
and there would be no alternative but to send and 
arrest the blacksmith by force, and punish her, the 
queen, too. Then the queen said that if the king 
swore to her that her brother should come to no 
harm, she would write as ordered. And the king 
swore. 

So the queen wrote to her brother, and adjured 
him by his love to her to come down to the Golden 
City. She said she had dire need of him, and she 
told him that the king had sworn that no harm 
should come to him. 

The letter was sent off by a king's messenger. 
In due time the blacksmith arrived, and he was 
immediately seized and thrown into prison to await 
his trial. 

When the queen saw that she had been deceived, 
she was in despair. She tried by every way, by 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 265 

tears and entreaties and caresses, to move the king, 
but all without avail. Then she tried by plotting 
and bribery to gain her brother's release, but it was 
all in vain. The day for trial came quickly, and the 
blacksmith was tried, and he was condemned and 
sentenced to be burnt alive by the river on the 
following day. 

On the evening of the day of trial the queen sent 
a message to the king to come to her ; and when 
the king came reluctantly, fearing a renewal of 
entreaties, expecting a woman made of tears and 
sobs, full of grief, he found instead that the queen 
had dried her eyes and dressed herself still more 
beautifully than ever, till she seemed to the king the 
very pearl among women. And she told the king 
that he was right, and she was wrong. She said, 
putting her arms about him and caressing him, that 
she had discovered that it was true that her brother 
had been plotting against the king, and therefore his 
death was necessary. It was terrible, she said, to 
find that her brother, whom she had always held as 
a pattern, was no better than a traitor; but it was 
even so, and her king was the wisest of all kings to 
find it out. 

The king was delighted to find his queen in this 
mood, and he soothed her and talked to her kindly 
and sweetly, for he really loved her, though he had 
given in to bad advice about the brother. And 
when the king's suspicions were lulled, the queen 
said to him that she had now but one request to 
make, and that was that she might have permission 
to go down with her maids to the river-shore in the 
early morning, and see herself the execution of her 



266 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

traitor brother. The king, who would now have 
granted her anything — anything she asked, except 
just that one thing, the life of her brother — gave 
permission ; and then the queen said that she was 
tired and wished to rest after all the trouble of the 
last few days, and would the king leave her. So 
the king left her to herself, and went away to his 
own chambers. 

Very early in the morning, ere the crimson flush 
upon the mountains had faded in the light of day, 
a vast crowd was gathered below the city, by the 
shore of the great river. Very many thousands 
were there, of many countries and peoples, crowding 
down to see a man die, to see a traitor burnt to 
death for his sins, for there is nothing men like so 
much as to see another man die. 

Upon a little headland jutting out into the river 
the pyre was raised, with brushwood and straw, to 
burn quickly, and an iron post in the middle to 
which the man was to be chained. At one side 
was a place reserved, and presently down from the 
palace in a long procession came the queen and her 
train of ladies to the place kept for her. Guards 
were put all about to prevent the people crowding ; 
and then came the soldiers, and in the midst of 
them the blacksmith ; and amid many cries of 
' Traitor, traitor ! ' and shouts of derision, he was 
bound to the iron post within the wood and the 
straw, and the guards fell back. 

The queen sat and watched it all, and said never 
a word. Fire was put to the pyre, and it crept 
rapidly up in long red tongues with coils of black 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 267 

smoke. It went very quickly, for the wood was 
very dry, and a light breeze came laughing up the 
river and helped it. The flames played about the 
man chained there in the midst, and he made never 
a sign ; only he looked steadily across at the purple 
mountain where his home lay, and it was clear that 
in a few more moments he would be dead. There 
was a deep silence everywhere. 

Then of a sudden, before anyone knew, before a 
hand could be held out to hinder her, the queen rose 
from her seat and ran to the pyre. In a moment 
she was there and had thrown herself into the flames, 
and with her arms about her brother's neck she 
turned and faced the myriad eyes that glared upon 
them — the queen, in all the glory of her beauty, 
glittering with gems, and the man with great 
shackled bare limbs, dressed in a few rags, his 
muscles already twisted with the agony of the fire. 
A great cry of horror came from the people, and 
there was the movement of guards and officers 
rushing to stop the fire ; but it was all of no use. 
A great flash of red flames came out of the logs, 
folding these twain like an imperial cloak, a whirl of 
sparks towered into the air, and when one could see 
again the woman and her brother were no longer 
there. They were dead and burnt, and the bodies 
mingled with the ashes of the fire. She had cost 
her brother his life, and she went with him into 
death. 

Some days after this a strange report was brought 
to the palace. By the landing-place near the spot 
where the fire had been was a great fig-tree. It 



268 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

was so near to the landing-place, and was such a 
magnificent tree, that travellers coming from the 
boats, or waiting for a boat to arrive, would rest in 
numbers under its shade. But the report said that 
something had happened there. To travellers sleep- 
ing beneath the tree at night it was stated that two 
Nats had appeared, very large and very beautiful, a 
man Nat and a woman Nat, and had frightened 
them very much indeed. Noises were heard in the 
tree, voices and cries, and a strange terror came 
upon those who approached it. Nay, it was even 
said that men had been struck by unseen hands 
and severely hurt, and others, it was said, had dis- 
appeared. Children who went to play under the 
tree were never seen again : the Nats took them, 
and their parents sought for them in vain. So the 
landing-place was deserted, and a petition was 
brought to the king, and the king gave orders that 
the tree should be hewn down. So the tree was 
cut down, and its trunk was thrown into the river ; 
it floated away out of sight, and nothing happened 
to the men who cut the tree, though they were 
deadly afraid. 

The tree floated down for days, until at last ft 
stranded near a landing-place that led to a large 
town, where the governor of these parts lived ; and 
at this landing-place the portents that had frightened 
the people at the great city reappeared and terrified 
the travellers here too, and they petitioned the 
governor. 

The governor sought out a great monk, a very 
holy man learned in these matters, and sent him to 
inquire, and the monk came down to the tree and 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 269 

spoke. He said that if any Nats lived in the tree, 
they should speak to him and tell him what they 
wanted. * It is not fit,' he said, * for great Nats to 
terrify the poor villagers at the landing-place. Let 
the Nats speak and say what they require. All 
that they want shall be given.' And the Nats spake 
and said that they wanted a place to live in where 
they could be at peace, and the monk answered for 
the governor that all his land was at their disposal. 
' Let the Nats choose,' he said ; * all the country is 
before them.' So the Nats chose, and said that they 
would have Popa Mountain, and the monk agreed. 

The Nats then left the tree and went away, far 
away inland, to the great Popa Mountain, and took 
up their abode there, and all the people there feared 
and reverenced them, and even made to their honour 
two statues with golden heads and set them up on 
the mountain. 

This is the story of the Popa Nats, the greatest 
Nats of all the country of Burma, the guardian 
spirits of the mysterious mountain. The golden 
heads of the statues are now in one of our treasuries, 
put there for safe custody during the troubles, though 
it is doubtful if even then anyone would have dared 
to steal them, so greatly are the Nats feared. And 
the hunters and the travellers there must offer to 
the Nats little offerings, if they would be safe in these 
forests, and even the young man must obtain per- 
mission from the Nats before he marry. 

I think these stories that I have told, stories 
selected from very many that I have heard, will 
show what sort of spirits these are that the Burmese 



270 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

have peopled their trees and rivers with ; will show 
what sort of religion it is that underlies, without 
influencing, the creed of the Buddha that they 
follow. It is of the very poetry of superstition, 
free from brutality, from baseness, from anything 
repulsive, springing, as I have said, from their innate 
sympathy with Nature and recognition of the life 
that works in all things. It always seems to me 
that beliefs such as these are a great key to the 
nature of a people, are, apart from all interest in 
their beauty, and in their akinness to other beliefs, 
of great value in trying to understand the character 
of a nation. 

For to beings such as Nats and fairies the people 
who believe in them will attribute such qualities as 
are predominant in themselves, as they consider 
admirable ; and, indeed, all supernatural beings are 
but the magnified shadows of man cast by the light 
of his imagination upon the mists of his ignorance. 

Therefore, when you find that a people make 
their spirits beautiful and fair, calm and even- 
tempered, loving peace and the beauty of the trees 
and rivers, shrinkingly averse from loud words, from 
noises, and from the taking of life, it is because the 
people themselves think that these are great qualities. 
If no stress be laid upon their courage, their activity, 
their performance of great deeds, it is because the 
people who imagine them care not for such things. 
There is no truer guide, I am sure, to the heart of a 
young people than their superstitions ; these they 
make entirely for themselves, apart from their religion, 
which is, to a certain extent, made for them. That 
is why I have written this chapter on Nats : not 



XX ALL LIFE IS ONE 271 

because I think it affects Buddhism very much one 
way or another, but because it seems to me to reveal 
the people themselves, because it helps us to under- 
stand them better, to see more with their eyes, to be 
in unison with their ideas — because it is a great key 
to the soul of the people. 



CHAPTER XXI 

DEATH, THE DELIVERER 

* The end of my life is near at hand ; seven days hence, like a man 
who rids himself of a heavy load, I shall be free from the burden of my 
body. ' — Death of the Buddha. 

There is a song well known to all the Burmese, the 
words of which are taken from the sacred writings. 
It is called the story of Ma Pa Da, and it was first 
told to me by a Burmese monk, long ago, when I was 
away on the frontier. 

It runs like this : 

In the time of the Buddha, in the city of Thawatti, 
there was a certain rich man, a merchant, who had 
many slaves. Slaves in those days, and, indeed, 
generally throughout the East, were held very 
differently to slaves in Europe. They were part of 
the family, and were not saleable without good 
reason, and there was a law applicable to them. 
They were not hors de la loiy like the slaves of which 
we have conception. There, are many cases quoted 
of sisters being slaves to sisters, and of brothers to 
brothers, quoted not for the purpose of saying that 
this was an uncommon occurrence, but merely of 
showing points of law in such cases. 

272 



CH.xxi DEATH, THE DELIVERER 273 

One day in the market the merchant bought 
another slave, a young man, handsome and well 
mannered, and took him to his house, and kept him 
there with his family and the other slaves. The 
young man was earnest and careful in his work, and 
the merchant approved of him, and his fellow-slaves 
liked him. But Ma Pa Da, the merchant's daughter, 
fell in love with him. The slave was much troubled 
at this, and he did his best to avoid her ; but he 
was a slave and under orders, and what could he 
do ? When she would come to him secretly and 
make love to him, and say, * Let us flee together, 
for we love each other,' he would refuse, saying that 
he was a slave, and the merchant would be very 
angry. He said he could not do such a thing. And 
yet when the girl said, * Let us flee, for we love 
each other,' he knew that it was true, and that he 
loved her as she loved him ; and it was only his 
honour to his master that held him from doing as 
she asked. 

But because his heart was not of iron, and there 
are few men that can resist when a woman comes 
and woos them, he at last gave way ; and they fled 
away one night, the girl and the slave, taking with 
them her jewels and some money. They travelled 
rapidly and in great fear, and did not rest till they 
came to a city far away where the merchant would 
never, they thought, think of searching for them. 

Here, in this city where no one knew of their 
history, they lived in great happiness, husband and 
wife, trading with the money they had with them. 

And in time a little child was born to them. 

About two or three years after this it became 

T 



274 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

necessary for the husband to take a journey, and he 
started forth with his wife and child. The journey 
was a very long one, and they were unduly delayed ; 
and so it happened that while still in the forest the 
wife fell ill, and could not go on any further. So 
the husband built a hut of branches and leaves, and 
there, in the solitude of the forest, was born to them 
another little son. 

The mother recovered rapidly, and in a little time 
she was well enough to go on. They were to start 
next morning on their way again ; and in the even- 
ing the husband went out, as was his custom, to cut 
firewood, for the nights were cold and damp. 

Ma Pa Da waited and waited for him, but he 
never came back. 

The sun set and the dark rose out of the ground, 
and the forest became full of whispers, but he never 
came. All night she watched and waited, caring 
for her little ones, fearful to leave them alone, till 
at last the gray light came down, down from the 
sky to the branches, and from the branches to the 
ground, and she could see her way. Then, with her 
new-born babe in her arms and the elder little fellow 
trotting by her side, she went out to search for her 
husband. Soon enough she found him, not far off, 
stiff and cold beside his half-cut bundle of firewood. 
A snake had bitten him on the ankle, and he was dead. 

So Ma Pa Da was alone in the great forest, but 
a girl still, with two little children to care for. 

But she was brave, despite her trouble, and she 
determined to go on and gain some village. She 
took her baby in her arms and the little one by the 
hand, and started on her journey. 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 275 

And for a time all went well, till at last she came 
to a stream. It was not very deep, but it was too 
deep for the little boy to wade, for it came up to 
his neck, and his mother was not strong enough 
to carry both at once. So, after considering for a 
time, she told the elder boy to wait. She would 
cross and put the baby on the far side, and return 
for him. 

' Be good,' she said ; ' be good, and stay here 
quietly till I come back ' ; and the boy promised. 

The stream was deeper and swifter than she 
thought ; but she went with great care and gained 
the far side, and put the baby under a tree a little 
distance from the bank, to lie there while she went 
for the other boy. Then, after a few minutes' rest, 
she went back. 

She had got to the centre of the stream, and her 
little boy had come down to the margin to be ready 
for her, when she heard a rush and a cry from the 
side she had just left ; and, looking round, she saw 
with terror a great eagle sweep down upon the baby, 
and carry it off in its claws. She turned round and 
waved her arms and cried out to the eagle, ' He ! he ! ' 
hoping it would be frightened and drop the baby. 
But it cared nothing for her cries or threats, and 
swept on with long curves over the forest trees, 
away out of sight. 

Then the mother turned to gain the bank once 
more, and suddenly she missed her son who had 
been waiting for her. He had seen his mother 
wave her arms ; he had heard her shout, and he 
thought she was calling him to come to her. So 
the brave little man walked down into the water, 



276 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and the black current carried him off his feet at 
once. He was gone, drowned in the deep water 
below the ford, tossing on the waves towards the 
sea. 

No one can write of the despair of the girl when 
she threw herself under a tree in the forest. The 
song says it was very terrible. 

At last she said to herself, ' I will get up now and 
return to my father in Thawatti ; he is all I have 
left. Though I have forsaken him all these years, 
yet now that my husband and his children are dead, 
my father will take me back again. Surely he will 
have pity on me, for I am much to be pitied.' 

So she went on, and at length, after many days, 
she came to the gates of the great city where her 
father lived. 

At the entering of the gates she met a large 
company of people, mourners, returning from a 
funeral, and she spoke to them and asked them : 

' Who is it that you have been burying to-day so 
grandly with so many mourners ? ' 

And the people answered her, and told her who 
it was. And when she heard, she fell down upon 
the road as one dead ; for it was her father and 
mother who had died yesterday, and it was their 
funeral train that she saw. They were all dead 
now, husband and sons and father and mother ; in 
all the world she was quite alone. 

So she went mad, for her trouble was more than 
she could bear. She threw off all her clothes, and 
let down her long hair and wrapped it about her 
naked body, and walked about raving. 

At last she came to where the Buddha was teach- 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 277 

ing, seated under a fig-tree. She came up to the 
Buddha, and told him of her losses, and how she 
had no one left ; and she demanded of the Buddha 
that he should restore to her those that she had lost. 
And the Buddha had great compassion upon her, 
and tried to console her. 

* All die,' he said ; * it comes to everyone, king 
and peasant, animal and man. Only through many 
deaths can we obtain the Great Peace. All this 
sorrow,' he said, * is of the earth. All this is passion 
which we must get rid of, and forget before we reach 
heaven. Be comforted, my daughter, and turn to 
the holy life. All suffer as you do. It is part of 
our very existence here, sorrow and trouble without 
any end.' 

But she would not be comforted, but demanded 
her dead of the Buddha. Then, because he saw it 
was no use talking to her, that her ears were deaf 
with grief, and her eyes blinded with tears, he said 
to her that he would restore to her those who were 
dead. 

' You must go,' he said, * my daughter, and get 
some mustard-seed, a pinch of mustard-seed, and I 
can bring back their lives. Only you must get this 
seed from the garden of him near whom death has 
never come. Get this, and all will be well.' 

So the woman went forth with a light heart. It 
was so simple, only a pinch of mustard-seed, and 
mustard grew in every garden. She would get the 
seed and be back very quickly, and then the Lord 
Buddha would give her back those she loved who 
had died. She clothed herself again and tied up 
her hair, and went cheerfully and asked at the first 



278 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

house, ' Give me a pinch of mustard-seed,' and it was 
given readily. So with her treasure in her hand she 
was going forth back to the Buddha full of delight, 
when she remembered. 

* Has ever anyone died in your household ? ' she 
asked, looking round wistfully. 

The man answered 'Yes,' that death had been 
with them but recently. Who could this woman be, 
he thought, to ask such a question ? And the 
woman went forth, the seed dropping from her care- 
less fingers, for it was of no value. So she would 
try again and again, but it was always the same. 
Death had taken his tribute from all. Father or 
mother, son or brother, daughter or wife, there was 
always a gap somewhere, a vacant place beside the 
meal. From house to house throughout the city 
she went, till at last the new hope faded away, and 
she learned from the world, what she had not 
believed from the Buddha, that death and life are 
one. 

So she returned, and she became a nun, poor 
soul ! taking on her the two hundred and twenty- 
seven vows, which are so hard to keep that nowadays 
nuns keep but five of them.^ 

This is the teaching of the Buddha, that death is 
inevitable ; this is the consolation he offers, that all 
men must know death ; no one can escape death ; 

^ These five vows are : 

1. Not to take life. 

2. To be honest. 

3. To tell the truth. 

4. To abstain from intoxicants. 

5. Chastity. 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 279 

no one can escape the sorrow of the death of those 
whom he loves. Death, he says, and life are one ; 
not antagonistic, but the same ; and the only way 
to escape from one is to escape from the other too. 
Only in the Great Peace, when we have found refuge 
from the passion and tumult of life, shall we find 
the place where death cannot come. Life and death 
are one. 

This IS the teaching of the Buddha, repeated over 
and over again to his disciples when they sorrowed 
for the death of Thariputra, when they were in 
despair at the swift-approaching end of the great 
teacher himself Hear what he says to Ananda, the 
beloved disciple, who is mourning over Thariputra. 

* Ananda,' he said, ' often and often have I sought 
to bring shelter to your soul from the misery caused 
by such grief as this. There are two things alone 
that can separate us from father and mother, from 
brother and sister, from all those who are most 
cherished by us, and those two things are distance 
and death. Think not that I, though the Buddha, 
have not felt all this even as any other of you ; was 
I not alone when I was seeking for wisdom in the 
wilderness ? 

* And yet what would T have gained by wailing 
and lamenting either for myself or for others ? 
Would it have brought to me any solace from my 
loneliness? would it have been any help to those 
whom I had left ? There is nothing that can 
happen to us, however terrible, however miserable, 
that can justify tears and lamentations and make 
them aught but a weakness.' 

And so, we are told, in this way the Buddha 



28o THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

soothed the affliction of Ananda, and filled his soul 
with consolation — the consolation of resignation. 

For there is no other consolation possible but 
this, resignation to the inevitable, the conviction of 
the uselessness of sorrow, the vanity and selfishness 
of grief 

There is no meeting again with the dead. No- 
where in the recurring centuries shall we meet again 
those whom we have loved, whom we love, who 
seem to us to be parts of our very soul. That which 
survives of us, the part which is incarnated again and 
again, until it be fit for heaven, has nothing to do 
with love and hate. 

Even if in the whirlpool of life our paths should 
cross again the paths of those whom we have loved, 
we are never told that we shall know them again 
and love them. 

A friend of mine has just lost his mother, and he 
is very much distressed. He must have been very 
fond of her, for although he has a wife and children, 
and is happy in his family, he is in great sorrow. 
He proposes even to build a pagoda over her 
remains, a testimony of respect which in strict 
Buddhism is reserved to saints. He has been 
telling me about this, and how he is trying to get 
a sacred relic to put in the pagoda, and I asked 
him if he never hoped again to meet the soul 
of his mother on earth or in heaven, and he 
answered : 

* No. It is very hard, but so are many things, 
and they have to be borne. Far better it is to face 
the truth than to escape by a pleasant falsehood. 
There is a Burmese proverb that tells us that all 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 281 

the world is one vast burial-ground ; there are dead 
men everywhere.' 

' One of our great men has said the same/ 1 
answered. 

He was not surprised. 

' As it is true,' he said, * I suppose all great men 
would see it.' 

Thus there is no escape, no loophole for a 
delusive hope, only the cultivation of the courage 
of sorrow. 

There are never any exceptions to the laws of 
the Buddha. If a law is a law, that is the end of 
it. Just as we know of no exceptions to the law of 
gravitation, so there are no exceptions to the law 
of death. 

But although this may seem to be a religion of 
despair, it is not really so. This sorrow to which 
there is no relief is the selfishness of sorrow, the 
grief for our own loneliness ; for of sorrow, of fear, 
of pity for the dead, there is no need. We know 
that in time all will be well with them. We know 
that, though there may be before them vast periods 
of suffering, yet that they will all at last be in 
Nebhan with us. And if we shall not know them 
there, still we shall know that they are there, all of 
them — not one will be wanting. Purified from the 
lust of life, white souls steeped in the Great Peace, 
all living things will attain rest at last. 

There is this remarkable fact in Buddhism, that 
nowhere is any fear expressed of death itself, no- 
where any apprehension of what may happen to tlie 
dead. It is the sorrow of separation, the terror of 



282 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

death to the survivors, that is always dwelt upon 
with compassion, and the agony of which it is sought 
to soothe. 

That the dying man himself should require 
strengthening to face the King of Terrors is hardly 
ever mentioned. It seems to be taken for granted 
that men should have courage in themselves to 
take leave of life becomingly, without undue fears. 
Buddhism is the way to show us the escape from 
the miseries of life, not to give us hope in the hour 
of death. 

It is true that to all Orientals death is a less 
fearful thing than it is to us. I do not know what 
may be the cause of this, courage certainly has little 
to do with it ; but it is certain that the purely 
physical fear of death, that horror and utter re- 
vulsion that seizes the majority of us at the idea of 
death, is absent from most Orientals. And yet this 
cannot explain it all. For fear of death, though less, 
is still there, is still a strong influence upon their 
lives, and it would seem that no religion which 
ignored this great fact could become a great living 
religion. 

Religion is made for man, to fit his necessities, 
not man for religion, and yet the faith of Buddhism 
is not concerned with death. 

Consider our faith, how much of its teaching con- 
sists of how to avoid the fear of death, how much of 
its consolation is for the death-bed. How we are 
taught all our lives that we should live so as not to 
fear death ; how we have priests and sacraments to 
soothe the dying man, and give him hope and courage, 
and how the crown and summit of our creed is that 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 283 

we should die easily. And consider that in Buddhism 
all this is absolutely wanting. Buddhism is a creed 
of life, of conduct ; death is the end of that life, that 
is all. 

We have all seen death. We have all. of us 
watched those who, near and dear to us, go away 
out of our ken. There is no need for me to recall 
the last hours of those of our faith, to bring up again 
the fading eye and waning breath, the messages of 
hope we search for in our Scriptures to give hope 
to him who is going, the assurances of religion, the 
cross held before the dying eyes. 

Many men, we are told, turn to religion at the 
last after a life of wickedness, and a man may do so 
even at the eleventh hour and be saved. 

That is part of our belief; that is the strongest 
part of our belief; and that is the hope that all 
fervent Christians have, that those they love may be 
saved even at the end. 

I think it may truly be said that our Western 
creeds are all directed at the hour of death, as the 
great and final test of that creed. 

And now think of Buddhism ; it is a creed of life. 
In life you must win your way to salvation by urgent 
effort, by suffering, by endurance. On your death- 
bed you can do nothing. If you have done well, 
then it is well ; if ill, then you must in future life 
try again and again till you succeed. A life is not 
washed, a soul is not made fit for the dwelling of 
eternity, in a moment. 

Repentance to a Buddhist is but the opening of 
the eyes to see the path to righteousness ; it has no 
virtue in itself. To have seen that we are sinners 



284 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

is but the first step to cleansing our sin ; in itself it 
cannot purify. 

As well ask a robber of the poor to repent, and 
suppose thereby that those who have suffered from 
his guilt are compensated for the evil done to them 
by his repentance, as to ask a Buddhist to believe 
that a sinner can at the last moment make good to 
his own soul all the injuries caused to that soul by 
the wickedness of his life. 

Or suppose a man who has destroyed his con- 
stitution by excess to be by the very fact of 
acknowledging that excess restored to health. 

The Buddhist will not have that at all. A man 
is what he makes himself; and that making is a 
matter of terrible effort, of unceasing endeavour 
towards the right, of constant suppression of sin, 
till sin be at last dead within him. If a man has 
lived a wicked life, he dies a wicked man, and no 
wicked man can obtain the perfect rest of the sinless 
dead. Heaven is shut to him. But if heaven is 
shut it is not shut for ever ; if hell may perhaps 
open to him it is only for a time, only till he is 
purified and washed from the stain of his sins ; and 
then he can begin again, and have another chance 
to win heaven. If there is no immediate heaven 
there is no eternal hell, and in due time all will 
reach heaven ; all will have learnt, through suffer- 
ing, the wisdom the Buddha has shown to us, that 
only by a just life can men reach the Great Peace 
even as he did. 

So you see that if Buddhism has none of the 
consolation for the dying man that Christianity holds 
out, in the hope of heaven, so it has none of the 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 285 

threats and terrors of our faith. There is no fear of 
an angry Judge — of a Judge who is angry. 

And yet when I came to think over the matter, 
it seemed to me that surely there must be something 
to calm him in the face of death. If Buddhism does 
not furnish this consolation, he must go elsewhere 
for it. And I was not satisfied, because I could find 
nothing in the sacred books about a man's death, 
that therefore the creed of the people had ignored it. 
A living creed must, I was sure, provide for this 
somehow. 

So I went to a friend of mine, a Burman magis- 
trate, and I asked him : 

' When a man is dying, what does he try to think 
of? What do you say to comfort him that his last 
moments may be peace ? The monks do not come, 
I know.' 

' The monks ! ' he said, shaking his head ; * what 
could they do ? ' 

I did not know. 

' Can you do anything,' I asked, ' to cheer him ? 
Do you speak to him of what may happen after 
death, of hopes of another life ? ' 

' No one can tell,' said my friend, * what will 
happen after death. It depends on a man's life, if 
he has done good or evil, what his next existence 
will be, whether he will go a step nearer to the 
Peace. When the man is dying no monks will 
come, truly ; but an old man, an old friend, father, 
perhaps, or an elder of the village, and he will talk 
to the dying man. He will say, " Think of your 
good deeds ; think of all that you have done well 
in this life. Think of your good deeds." ' 



286 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

* What IS the use of that ? ' I asked. * Suppose 
you think of your good deeds, what then ? Will 
that bring peace ? ' 

And the Burman seemed to think that it would. 

* Nothing,' he said, * was so calming to a man's 
soul as to think of even one deed he had done well 
in his life/ 

Think of the man dying. The little house built 
of bamboo and thatch, with an outer veranda, where 
the friends are sitting, and the inner room, behind a 
wall of bamboo matting, where the man is lying. A 
pot of flowers is standing on a shelf on one side, and 
a few cloths are hung here and there beneath the 
brown rafters. The sun comes in through little 
chinks in roof and wall, making curious lights in the 
semi-darkness of the room, and it is very hot. 

From outside come the noises of the village, cries 
of children playing, grunts of cattle, voices of men 
and women clearly heard through the still clear air 
of the afternoon. There is a woman pounding rice 
near by with a steady thud, thud of the lever, and 
there is a clink of a loom where a girl is weaving 
ceaselessly. All these sounds come into the house 
as if there were no walls at all, but they are unheeded 
from long custom. 

The man lies on a low bed with a fine mat spread 
under him for bedding. His wife, his grown-up 
children, his sister, his brother are about him, for 
the time is short, and death comes very quickly in 
the East. They talk to him kindly and lovingly, 
but they read to him no sacred books ; they give 
him no messages from the world to which he is 
bound ; they whisper to him no hopes of heaven. 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 287 

He is tortured with no fears of everlasting hell. 
Yet life is sweet and death is bitter, and it is hard 
to go ; and as he tosses to and fro in his fever there 
comes in to him an old friend, the headman of the 
village perhaps, with a white muslin fillet bound 
about his kind old head, and he sits beside the 
dying man and speaks to him. 

* Remember,' he says slowly and clearly, ' all those 
things that you have done well. Think of your good 
deeds.' 

And as the sick man turns wearily, trying to 
move his thoughts as he is bidden, trying to direct 
the wheels of memory, the old man helps him to 
remember. 

' Think,' he says, ' of your good deeds, of how 
you have given charity to the monks, of how you 
have fed the poor. Remember how you worked 
and saved to build the little rest-house in the forest 
where the traveller stays and finds water for his 
thirst. All these are pleasant things, and men will 
always be grateful to you. Remember your brother, 
how you helped him in his need, how you fed him 
and went security for him till he was able again to 
secure his own living. You did well to him, surely 
that is a pleasant thing.' 

I do not think it difficult to see how the sick 
man's face will lighten, how his eyes will brighten 
at the thoughts that come to him at the old man's 
words. And he goes on : 

* Remember when the squall came up the river 
and the boat upset when you were crossing here ; 
how it seemed as if no man could live alone in such 
waves, and yet how you clung to and saved the boy 



288 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

who was with you, swimming through the water that 
splashed over your head and very nearly drowned 
you. The boy's father and mother have never for- 
gotten that, and they are even now mourning without 
in the veranda. It is all due to you that their lives 
have not been full of misery and despair. Remember 
their faces when you brought their little son to them 
saved from death in the great river. Surely that is 
a pleasant thing. Remember your wife who is now 
with you ; how you have loved her and cherished 
her, and kept faithful to her before all the world. 
You have been a good husband to her, and you 
have honoured her. She loves you, and you have 
loved her all your long life together. Surely that is 
a pleasant thing.' 

Yes, surely these are pleasant things to have with 
one at the last. Surely a man will die easier with 
such memories as these before his eyes, with love 
in those about him, and the calm of good deeds in 
his dying heart. If it be a different way of soothing 
a man's end to those which other nations use, is it 
the worse for that ? 

Think of your good deeds. It seems a new idea 
to me that in doing well in our life we are making 
for ourselves a pleasant death, because of the memory 
of those things. And if we have none ? or if evil 
so outnumbered the good deeds as to hide and 
overwhelm them, what then ? His death will be 
terrible indeed if he cannot in all his days remember 
one good deed that he has done. 

' All a man's life comes before him at the hour of 
death,' said my informant ; ' all, from the earliest 
memory to the latest breath. Like a whole land- 



XXI DEATH, THE DELIVERER 289 

scape called by a flash of lightning out of the dark 
night. It is all there, every bit of it, good and evil, 
pleasure and pain, sin and righteousness.' 

A man cannot escape from his life even in death. 
In our acts of to-day we are determining what our 
death will be ; if we have lived well, we shall die 
well ; and if not, then not. As a man lives so shall 
he die, is the teaching of Buddhism as of other 
creeds. 

So what Buddhism has to offer to the dying 
believer is this, that if he live according to its 
tenets he will die happily, and that in the life that 
he will next enter upon he will be less and less 
troubled by sin, less and less wedded to the lust of 
life, until sometime, far away, he shall gain the great 
Deliverance. He shall have perfect Peace, perfect 
rest, perfect happiness, he and his, in that heaven 
where his teacher went before him long ago. 

And if we should say that this Deliverance from 
life, this Great Peace, is Death, what matter, if it be 
indeed Peace ? 



U 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE potter's wheel 

' Life is like a great whirlpool wherein we are dashed to and fro 
by our passions.' — Saying of the Buddha. 

It is a hard teaching, this of the Buddha about 
death. It is a teaching that may appeal to the 
reason, but not to the soul. That when life goes 
out, this thing which we call * I ' goes out with it, 
and that love and remembrance are dead for ever. 

It is so hard a teaching that in its purity the 
people cannot believe it. They accept it, but they 
have added on to it a belief which changes the 
whole form of it, a belief that is the outcome of 
that weakness of humanity which insists that death 
is not and cannot be all. 

Though to the strict Buddhist death is the end 
of all worldly passion, to the Burmese villager that 
is not so. He cannot grasp, he cannot endure that 
it should be so, and he has made for himself out of 
Buddhism a belief that is opposed to all Buddhism 
in this matter. 

He believes in the transmigration of souls, in the 
survival of the * L' The teaching that what survives 

290 



CH.xxii THE POTTER'S WHEEL 291 

is not the * I,' but only the result of its action, is too 
deep for him to hold. True, if a flame dies the 
effects that it has caused remain, and the flame is 
dead for ever. A new flame is a new flame. But 
the * I ' of man cannot die, he thinks ; it lives and 
loves for all time. 

He has made out of the teaching a new teaching 
that is very far from that of the Buddha, and the 
teaching is this : When a man dies his soul remains, 
his ' I ' has only changed its habitation. Still it 
lives and breathes on earth, not the effect, but the 
soul itself. It is reborn among us, and it may even 
be recognized very often in its new abode. 

And that we should never forget this, that we 
should never doubt that this is true, it has been so 
ordered that many can remember something of these 
former lives of theirs. This belief is not to a 
Burman a mere theory, but is as true as anything 
he can see. For does he not daily see people who 
know of their former lives ? Nay, does he not him- 
self, often vaguely, have glimpses of that former 
life of his ? No man seems to be quite without it, 
but of course it is clearer to some than others. Just 
as we tell stories in the dusk of ghosts and second 
sight, so do they, when the day's work is over, 
gossip of stories of second birth ; only that they 
believe in them far more than we do in ghosts. 

A friend of mine put up for the night once at 
a monastery far away in the forest near a small 
village. He was travelling with an escort of 
mounted police, and there was no place else to sleep 
but in the monastery. The monk was, as usual, 
hospitable, and put what he had, bare house-room, 



292 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

at the officer's disposal, and he and his men settled 
down for the night. 

After dinner a fire was built on the ground, and 
the officer went and sat by it and talked to the 
headman of the village and the monk. First they 
talked of the dacoits and of crops, unfailing subjects 
of interest, and gradually they drifted from one sub- 
ject to another till the Englishman remarked about 
the monastery, that it was a very large and fine one 
for such a small secluded village to have built. The 
monastery was of the best and straightest teak, and 
must, he thought, have taken a very long time and 
a great deal of labour to build, for the teak must 
have been brought from very far away ; and in 
explanation he was told a curious story. 

It appeared that in the old days there used to 
be only a bamboo and grass monastery there, such 
a monastery as most jungle villages have ; and the 
then monk was distressed at the smallness of his 
abode and the little accommodation there was for 
his school — a monastery is always a school. So one 
rainy reason he planted with great care a number of 
teak seedlings round about, and he watered them 
and cared for them. ' When they are grown up,' 
he would say, * these teak-trees shall provide timber 
for a new and proper building ; and I will myself 
return in another life, and with those trees will I 
build a monastery more worthy than this.' Teak- 
trees take a hundred years to reach a mature size, 
and while the trees were still but saplings the monk 
died, and another monk taught in his stead. And 
so it went on, and the years went by, and from time 
to time new monasteries of bamboo were built and 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 293 

rebuilt, and the teak-trees grew bigger and bigger. 
But the village grew smaller, for the times were 
troubled, and the village was far away in the forest. 
So it happened that at last the village found itself 
without a monk at all : the last monk was dead, and 
no one came to take his place. 

It is a serious thing for a village to have no 
monk. To begin with, there is no one to teach the 
lads to read and write and do arithmetic ; and there is 
no one to whom you can give offerings and thereby 
get merit, and there is no one to preach to you and 
tell you of the sacred teaching. So the village was 
in a bad way. 

Then at last one evening, when the girls were all 
out at the well drawing water, they were surprised 
by the arrival of a monk walking in from the forest, 
weary with a long journey, footsore and hungry. 
The villagers received him with enthusiasm, fear- 
ing, however, that he was but passing through, and 
they furbished up the old monastery in a hurry for 
him to sleep in. But the curious thing was that 
the monk seemed to know it all. He knew the 
monastery and the path to it, and the ways about 
the village, and the names of the hills and the 
streams. It seemed, indeed, as if he must once have 
lived there in the village, and yet no one knew him 
or recognized his face, though he was but a young 
man still, and there were villagers who had lived 
there for seventy years. Next morning, instead of 
going on his way, the monk came into the village 
with his begging-bowl, as monks do, and went round 
and collected his food for the day ; and in the 
evening, when the villagers went to see him at the 



294 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

monastery, he told them he was going to stay. He 
recalled to them the monk who had planted the 
teak-trees, and how he had said that when the trees 
were grown he would return. ' I,' said the young 
monk, ' am he that planted these trees. Lo, they 
are grown up, and I am returned, and now we will 
build a monastery as I said.' 

When the villagers, doubting, questioned him, and 
old men came and talked to him of traditions of 
long-past days, he answered as one who knew all. 
He told them he had been born and educated far 
away in the South, and had grown up not know- 
ing who he had been ; and that he had entered 
a monastery, and in time became a Pongyi. The 
remembrance came to him, he went on, in a dream 
of how he had planted the trees and had promised 
to return to that village far away in the forest. 

The very next day he had started, and travelled 
day after day and week upon week, till at length he 
had arrived, as they sav/. So the villagers were 
convinced, and they set to work and cut down the 
great boles, and built the monastery such as my 
friend saw. And the monk lived there all his life, 
and taught the children, and preached the marvel- 
lous teaching of the great Buddha, till at length his 
time came again and he returned ; for of monks it 
is not said that they die, but that they return. 

This is the common belief of the people. Into 
this has the mystery of Dharma turned, in the 
thoughts of the Burmese Buddhists, for no one can 
believe the incomprehensible. A man has a soul, 
and it passes from life to life, as a traveller from inn 
to inn, till at length it is ended in heaven. But not 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 295 

till he has attained heaven in his heart will he attain 
heaven in reality. 

Many children, the Burmese will tell you, re- 
member their former lives. As they grow older 
the memories die away and they forget, but to the 
young children they are very clear. I have seen 
many such. 

About fifty years ago in a village named Okshit- 
gon were born two children, a boy and a girl. They 
were born on the same day in neighbouring houses, 
and they grew up together, and played together, 
and loved each other. And in due course they 
married and started a family, and maintained them- 
selves by cultivating their dry, barren fields about 
the village. They were always known as devoted 
to each other, and they died as they had lived — 
together. The same death took them on the same 
day ; so they were buried without the village and 
were forgotten ; for the times were serious. 

It was the year after the English army had taken 
Mandalay, and all Burma was in a fury of insur- 
rection. The country was full of armed men, the 
roads were unsafe, and the nights were lighted with 
the flames of burning villages. It was a bad time 
for peace-loving men, and many such, fleeing from 
their villages, took refuge in larger places nearer the 
centres of administration. 

Okshitgon was in the midst of one of the worst 
of all the distressed districts, and many of its people 
fled, and one of them, a man named Maung Kan, 
with his young wife went to the village of Kabyu 
and lived there. 

Now, Maung Kan's wife had borne to him twin 



296 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

sons. They were born at Okshitgon shortly before 
their parents had to run away, and they were named, 
the eldest Maung Gyi, which is Brother Big-fellow, 
and the younger Maung Nge, which means Brother 
Little-fellow. These lads grew up at Kabyu, and 
soon learned to talk ; and as they grew up their 
parents were surprised to hear them calling to each 
other at play, and calling each other, not Maung 
Gyi and Maung Nge, but Maung San Nyein and 
Ma Gywin. The latter is a woman's name, and the 
parents remembered that these were the names of 
the man and wife who had died in Okshitgon about 
the time the children were born. 

So the parents thought that the souls of the man 
and wife had entered into the children, and they 
took them to Okshitgon to try them. The children 
knew everything in Okshitgon ; they knew the roads 
and the houses and the people, and they recognized 
the clothes they used to wear in a former life ; there 
was no doubt about it. One of them, the younger, 
remembered, too, how she had borrowed two rupees 
once of a woman, Ma Thet, unknown to her hus- 
band, and left the debt unpaid. Ma Thet was still 
living, and so they asked her, and she recollected 
that it v/as true she had lent the money long ago. 
I did not hear that the children's father repaid the 
two rupees. 

Shortly afterwards I saw these two children. 
They are now just over six years old. The elder, 
into whom the soul of the man entered, is a fat, 
chubby little fellow, but the younger twin is smaller, 
and has a curious dreamy look in his face, more like 
a girl than a boy. They told me much about their 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 297 

former lives. After they died they said they lived 
for sometime without a body at all, wandering in 
the air and hiding in the trees. This was for their 
sins. Then, after some months, they were born 
again as twin boys. ' It used,' said the elder boy, 
* to be so clear, I could remember everything ; but 
it is getting duller and duller, and I cannot now 
remember as I used to do.' 

Of children such as this you may find any num- 
ber. Only j^ou have to look for them, as they are not 
brought forward spontaneously. The Burmese, like 
other people, hate to have their beliefs and ideas 
ridiculed, and from experience they have learned 
that the object of a foreigner in inquiring into their 
ways is usually to be able to show by his contempt 
how very much cleverer a man he is than they 
are. Therefore they are very shy. But once they 
understand that you only desire to learn and to see, 
and that you will always treat them with courtesy 
and consideration, they will tell you all that they 
think. 

A fellow officer of mine has a Burmese police 
orderly, a young man about twenty, who has been 
with him since he came to the district two years 
ago. Yet my friend only discovered accidentally 
the other day that his orderly remembers his former 
life. He is very unwilling to talk about it. He was 
a woman apparently in that former life, and lived 
about twenty miles away. He must have lived a 
good life, for it is a step of promotion to be a man 
in this life ; but he will not talk of it. He forgets 
most of it, he says, though he remembered it when 
he was a child. 



298 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

Sometimes this belief leads to lawsuits of a 
peculiarly difficult nature. In 1883, two years 
before the annexation of Upper Burma, there was 
a case that came into the local Court of the oil 
district which depended upon this theory of trans- 
migration. 

Opposite Yenangyaung there are many large 
islands in the river. These islands during the low 
water months are joined to the mainland, and are 
covered with a dense high grass in which many 
deer live. 

When the river rises, it rises rapidly, communica- 
tion with the mainland is cut off, and the islands are 
for a time, in the higher rises, entirely submerged. 
During the progress of the first rise some hunters 
went to one of these islands where many deer were 
to be found and set fire to the grass to drive them 
out of cover, shooting them as they came out. 
Some deer, fleeing before the fire, swam across and 
escaped, others fell victims, but one fawn, barely 
half grown, ran right down the island, and in its 
blind terror it leaped into a boat at anchor there. 
This boat was that of a fisherman who was plying 
his trade at some distance, and the only occupant 
of the boat was his wife. Now this woman had a 
year or so before lost her son, very much loved by 
her, but who was not quite of the best character, 
and when she saw the deer leaping into the boat, 
she at once fancied that she saw the soul of her 
erring son looking at her out of its great terrified 
eyes. So she got up and took the poor panting 
beast in her arms and soothed it, and when the 
hunters came running to her to claim it she refused. 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 299 

' He is my son,' she said, ' he is mine. Shall I give 
him up to death ? ' The hunters clamoured and 
threatened to take the deer by force, but the woman 
was quite firm. She would never give him up 
except with her life. ' You can see,' she said, ' that 
it is true that he is my son. He came running 
straight to me, as he always did in his trouble when 
he was a boy, and he is now quite quiet and con- 
tented, instead of being afraid of me as an ordinary 
deer would be.' And it was quite true that the 
deer took to her at once, and remained with her 
willingly. So the hunters went off to the court of 
the governor and filed a suit for the deer. 

The case was tried in open court, and the deer 
was produced with a ribbon round its neck. Evi- 
dence there was naturally but little. The hunters 
claimed the deer because they had driven it out of 
the island by their fire. The woman resisted the 
claim on the ground that it was her son. 

The decision of the court was this : 

' The hunters are not entitled to the deer because 
they cannot prove that the woman's son's soul is not 
in the animal. The woman is not entitled to the 
deer because she cannot prove that it is. The. deer 
will therefore remain with the court until some 
properly authenticated claim is put in.' 

So the two parties were turned out, the woman in 
bitter tears, and the hunters angry and vexed, and 
the deer remained the property of the judge. 

But this decision was against all Burmese ideas 
of justice. He should have given the deer to the 
woman. ' He wanted it for himself,' said a Burman, 
speaking to me of the affair. ' He probably killed 



300 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLF ch. 

it and ate it. Surely it is true that officials are of 
all the five evils the greatest' Then my friend 
remembered that I was myself an official, and he 
looked foolishj and began to make complimentary 
remarks about English officials, that they would 
never give such an iniquitous decision. I turned it 
off by saying that no doubt the judge was now 
suffering in some other life for the evil wrought in 
the last, and the Burman said that probably he was 
now inhabiting a tiger. 

It is very easy to laugh at such beliefs ; nothing 
is, indeed, easier than to be witty at the expense of 
any belief. It is also very easy to say that it is all 
self-deception, that the children merely imagine that 
they remember their former lives, or are citing con- 
versation of their elders. 

How this may be I do not know. What is the 
explanation of this, perhaps the only belief of which 
we have any knowledge which is at once a living 
belief to-day and was so as far back as we can get, 
I do not pretend to say. For transmigration is no 
theory of Buddhism at all, but was a leading tenet 
in the far older faith of Brahmanism, of which 
Buddhism was but an offshoot, as was Christianity 
of Judaism. 

I have not, indeed, attempted to reach the ex- 
planation of things I have seen. When I have 
satisfied myself that a belief is really held by the 
people, that I am not the subject of conscious de- 
ception, either by myself or others, I have conceived 
that my work was ended. 

There are those who, in investigating any foreign 
customs and strange beliefs, can put their finger here 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 301 

and say, ' This is where they are right ' ; and there 
and say, ' This behef is fooHshly wrong and idiotic' 
I am not, unfortunately, one of these writers. I 
have no such confident behef in my own infalHbihty 
of judgment as to be able to sit on high and say, 
' Here is truth, and here is error.' 

I will leave my readers to make their own judg- 
ment, if they desire to do so ; only asking them (as 
they would not like their own beliefs to be scoffed 
and sneered at) that they will treat with respect the 
sincere beliefs of others, even if they cannot accept 
them. It is only in this way that we can come to 
understand a people and to sympathize with them. 

It is hardly necessary to emphasize the enormous 
effect that a belief in transmigration such as this has 
upon the life and intercourse of the people. Of 
their kindness to animals I have spoken elsewhere, 
and it is possible this belief in transmigration has 
something to do with it, but not, I think, much. 
For if you wished to illtreat an animal, it would be 
quite easy, even more easy, to suppose that an 
enemy or a murderer inhabited the body of the 
animal, and that you were but carrying out the 
decrees of fate by ill-using it. But when you love 
an animal, it may increase that love and make it 
reasonable, and not a thing to be ashamed of; and 
it brings the animal world nearer to you in general, 
it bridges over the enormous void between man and 
beast that other religions have made. Nothing 
humanizes a man more than love of animals. 

I do not know if this be a paradox, I know that 
it is a truth. 

There was one point that puzzled me for a time 



302 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

in some of these stories of transmigration, such as 
the one I told about the man and wife being reborn 
twins. It was this : A man dies and leaves behind 
children, let us say, to whom he is devoutly attached. 
He is reborn in another family in the same village, 
maybe. It would be natural to suppose that he 
would love his former family as much as, or even 
more so than his new one. Complications might 
arise in this way which it is easy to conceive would 
cause great and frequent difficulties. 

I explained this to a Burman one day, and asked 
him what happened, and this is what he said : ' The 
affection of mother to son, of husband to wife, of 
brother to sister, belongs entirely to the body in 
which you may happen to be living. When it dies, 
so do these affections. New affections arise from 
the new body. The flesh of the son, being of one 
with his father, of course loves him ; but as his 
present flesh has no sort of connection with his 
former one, he does not love those to whom he was 
related in his other lives. These affections are as 
much a part of the body as the hand or the eye- 
sight ; with one you put ofl' the other.' 

Thus all love, to the learned, even the purest 
affection of daughter to mother, of man to his friend, 
is in theory a function of the body — with the one 
we put off the other ; and this may explain, perhaps, 
something of what my previous chapter did not 
make quite clear, that in the hereafter ^ of Buddhism 
there is no affection. 

When we have put off all bodies, when we have 

^ The hereafter = the state to which we attain when we have done 
with earthly things. 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 303 

attained Nirvana, love and hate, desire and repulsion, 
will have fallen from us for ever. 

Meanwhile, in each life, we are obliged to endure 
the affections of the body into which we may be 
born. It is the first duty of a monk, of him who 
is trying to lead the purer life, to kill all these 
affections, or rather to blend them into one great 
compassion to all the world alike. ' Gayuna,' com- 
passion, that is the only passion that will be left to 
us. So say the learned. 

I met a little girl not long ago, a wee little maiden 
about seven years old, and she told me all about her 
former life when she was a man. Her name was 
Maung Mon, she said, and she used to work the dolls 
in a travelling marionette show. It was through 
her knowledge and partiality for marionettes that it 
was first suspected, her parents told me, whom she 
had been in her former life. She could even as a 
sucking-child manipulate the strings of a marionette- 
doll. But the actual discovery came when she was 
about four years old, and she recognized a certain 
marionette booth and dolls as her own. She knew 
all about them, knew the name of each doll, and 
even some of the words they used to say in the 
plays. * I was married four times,' she told me. 

* Two wives died, one I divorced ; one was living 
when I died, and is living still. I loved her very 
much indeed. The one I divorced was a dreadful 
woman. See,' pointing to a scar on her shoulder, 

* this was given me once in a quarrel. She took up 
a chopper and cut me like this. Then I divorced 
her. She had a dreadful temper.' 

It was immensely quaint to hear this little thing 



304. THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

discoursing like this. The mark was a birth-mark, 
and I was assured that it corresponded exactly with 
one that had been given to the man by his wife 
in just such a quarrel as the one the little girl 
described. 

The divorced wife and the much-loved wife are 
still alive and not yet old. The last wife wanted 
the little girl to go and live with her. I asked her 
why she did not go. 

' You loved her so much, you know/ I said. ' She 
was such a good wife to you. Surely you would like 
to live with her again.' 

' But all that/ she replied, * was in a former 
life.' 

Now she loved only her present father and 
mother. The last life was like a dream. Broken 
memories of it still remained, but the loves and 
hates, the passions and impulses, were all dead. 

Another little boy told me once that the way re- 
membrance came to him was by seeing the silk he 
used to wear made into curtains, which are given to 
the monks and used as partitions in their monasteries, 
and as walls to temporary erections made at festival 
times. He was taken when some three years old to 
a feast at the making of a lad, the son of a wealthy 
merchant, into a monk. There he recognized in the 
curtain walling in part of the bamboo building his 
old dress. He pointed it out at once. 

This same little fellow told me that he passed 
three months between his death and his next incar- 
nation without a body. This was because he had 
once accidentally killed a fowl. Had he killed it on 
purpose, he would have been punished very much 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 305 

more severely. Most of this three months he spent 
dwelling in the hollow shell of a palm-fruit The 
nuisance was, he explained, that this shell was close 
to the cattle-path, and that the lads as they drove 
the cattle afield in the early morning would bang 
with a stick against the shell. This made things very 
uncomfortable for him inside. 

It is not an uncommon thing for a woman when 
about to be delivered of a baby to have a dream, and 
to see in that dream the spirit of someone asking for 
permission to enter the unborn child ; for, to a cer- 
tain extent, it lies within a woman's power to say 
who is to be the life of her child. 

There was a woman once who loved a young 
man, not of her village, very dearly. And he loved 
her, too, as dearly as she loved him, and he de- 
manded her in marriage from her parents ; but they 
refused. Why they refused I do not know, but 
probably because they did not consider the young 
man a proper person for their daughter to marry. 
Then he tried to run away with her, and nearly 
succeeded, but they were caught before they got 
clear of the village. 

The young man had to leave the neighbourhood. 
The attempted abduction of a girl is an offence 
severely punishable by law, so he fled ; and in time, 
under pressure from her people, the girl married 
another man ; but she never forgot She lived with 
her husband quite happily ; he was good to her, as 
most Burmese husbands are, and they got along well 
enough together. But there were no children. 

After some years, four or five, I believe, the 
former lover returned to his village. He thought 

X 



3o6 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

that after this lapse of time he would be safe from 
prosecution, and he was, moreover, very ill. 

He was so ill that very soon he died, without 
ever seeing again the girl he was so fond of; and 
when she heard of his death she was greatly dis- 
tressed, so that the desire of life passed away from 
her. 

It so happened that at this very time she found 
herself enceinte with her first child, and not long 
before the due time came for the child to be born 
she had a dream. 

She dreamt that her soul left her body, and went 
out into space and met there the soul of her lover 
who had died. She was rejoiced to meet him again, 
full of delight, so that the return of her soul to her 
body, her awakening to a world in which he was 
not, filled her with despair. So she prayed her 
lover, if it was now time for him again to be 
incarnated, that he would come to her — that his 
soul would enter the body of the little baby soon 
about to be born, so that they two might be together 
in life once more. 

And in the dream the lover consented. He 
would come, he said, into the child of the woman 
he loved. 

When the woman awoke she remembered it all, 
and the desire of life returned to her again, and all 
the world was changed because of the new life she 
felt within her. But she told no one then of the 
dream or of what was to happen. 

Only she took the greatest care of herself ; she 
ate well, and went frequently to the pagoda with 
flowers, praying that the body in which her lover 



XXII THE POTTER'S WHEEL 307 

was about to dwell might be fair and strong, worthy 
of him who took it, worthy of her who gave it. 

In due time the baby was born. But alas and 
alas for all her hopes ! The baby came but for a 
moment, to breathe a few short breaths, to cry, and 
to die ; and a few hours later the woman died also. 
But before she went she told someone all about it, 
all about the dream and the baby, and that she 
was glad to go and follow her lover. She said that 
her baby's soul was her lover's soul, and that as 
he could not stay, neither would she ; and with 
these words on her lips she followed him out into 
the void. 

The story was kept a secret until the husband 
died, not long afterwards ; but when I came to the 
village all the people knew it. 

I must confess that this story is to me full of the 
deepest reality, full of pathos. These stories seem 
to me to be the unconscious protestation of humanity 
against the dogmas of religion and of the learned. 
However it may be stated that love is but one of 
the bodily passions that dies with it, however, even 
in the very stories themselves, this explanation is 
used to clear certain difficulties, however opposed 
eternal love may be to one of the central doctrines 
of Buddhism, it seems to me that the very essence 
of this story is the belief that love does not die with 
the body, that it lives for ever and ever, through 
incarnation after incarnation. These stories are the 
very cry of the agony of humanity. 

' Love is strong as death ; many waters cannot 
quench love ' ; ay, and love is stronger than death. 
Not any dogmas of any religion, not any philosophy, 

X 2 



3o8 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xxii 

nothing in this world, nothing in the next, shall pre- 
vent him who loves from the certainty of rejoining 
some time the soul he loves. 

Nothing can kill this hope. It comes up and up, 
twisting theories of life, scorning the wisdom of the 
wise and the folly of the foolish, sweeping every- 
thing aside, until it reaches its unquenchable desire, 
reunion of lover with lover. It is unconquerable 
eternal as God Himself. But no Buddhist would 
admit this for a moment. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

THE FOREST OF TIME 
' The gate of that forest was Death. ' 

There was a great forest. It was full of giant trees 
that grew so high and were so thick overhead that 
the sunshine could not get down below. And there 
were huge creepers that ran from tree to tree 
climbing there, and throwing down great loops of 
rope. Under the trees, growing along the ground, 
were smaller creepers full of thorns, that tore the 
wayfarer and barred his progress. The forest, too, 
was full of snakes that crept along the ground, so 
like in their gray and yellow skins to the earth they 
travelled on that the traveller trod upon them un- 
awares and was bitten ; and some so beautiful with 
coral red and golden bars that men would pick 
them up as some dainty jewel till the snake turned 
upon them. 

Here and there in this forest were little glades 
wherein there were flowers. Beautiful flowers they 
were, with deep white cups and broad glossy leaves 
hiding the purple fruit ; and some had scarlet 
blossoms that nodded to and fro like drowsy men, 

309 



3IO THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

and there were long festoons of white stars. The 
air there was heavy with their scent. But they were 
all full of thorns, only you could not see the thorns 
till after you had plucked the blossom. 

This wood was pierced by roads. Many were 
very broad, leading through the forest in divers 
ways, some of them stopping now and then in the 
glades, others avoiding them more or less, but none 
of them were straight. Always, if you followed 
them, they bent and bent until after much travelling 
you were where you began ; and the broader the 
road, the softer the turf beneath it, the sweeter the 
glades that lined it, the quicker did it turn. 

One road there was that went straight, but it was 
far from the others. It led among the rocks and 
cliffs that bounded one side of the valley. It was 
very rough, very far from all the glades in the low- 
lands. No flowers grew beside it, there was no 
moss or grass upon it, only hard sharp rocks. It 
was very narrow, bordered with precipices. 

There were many lights in this wood, lights that 
flamed out like sunsets and died, lights that came 
like lightning in the night and were gone. This 
wood was never quite dark, it was so full of these 
lights that flickered aimlessly. 

There were men in this wood who wandered to 
and fro. The wood was full of them. 

They did not know whither they went ; they did 
not know whither they wished to go. Only this 
they knew, that they could never keep still ; for the 
keeper of this wood was Time. He was armed with 
a keen whip, and kept driving them on and on ; 
there was no rest. 



XXIII THE FOREST OF TIME 311 

Many of these when they first came loved the 
wood. The glades, they said, were very beautiful, 
the flowers very sweet. And so they wandered 
down the broad roads into the glades, and tried to 
lie upon the moss and love the flowers ; but Time 
would not let them. Just for a few moments they 
could have peace, and then they must on and on. 
But they did not care. * The forest is full of 
glades,' they said ; * if we cannot live in one, we 
can find another.' And so they went on finding 
others and others, and each one pleased them less. 

Some few there were who did not go to the 
glades at all. * They are very beautiful,' they said, 
* but these roads that pass through them, whither 
do they lead ? Round and round and round again. 
There is no peace there. Time rules in those 
glades, Time with his whip and goad, and there is 
no peace. What we want is rest. And those 
lights,' they said, * they are wandering lights, like 
the summer lightning far down in the South, 
moving hither and thither. We care not for such 
lights. Our light is firm and clear. What we 
desire is peace ; we do not care to wander for ever 
round this forest, to see for ever those shifting 
lights.' 

And so they would not go down the winding 
roads, but essayed the path upon the cliffs. ' It is 
narrow,' they said, ' it has no flowers, it is full of 
rocks, but it is straight. It will lead us somewhere, 
not round and round and round again — it will take 
us somewhere. And there is a light,' they said, 
' before us, the light of a star. It is very small now, 
but it is always steady ; it never flickers or wanes. 



312 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch. 

It is the star of Truth. Under that star we shall 
find that which we seek.' 

And so they went upon their road, toiling upon 
the rocks, falling now and then, bleeding with 
wounds from the sharp points, sore -footed, but 
strong-hearted. And ever as they went they were 
farther and farther from the forest, farther and 
farther from the glades and the flowers with deadly 
scents ; they heard less and less the crack of the 
whip of Time falling upon the wanderers' shoulders. 

The star grew nearer and nearer, the light grew 
greater and greater, the false lights died behind 
them, until at last they came out of the forest, and 
there they found the lake that washes away all 
desire under the sun of Truth. 

They had won their way. Time and Life and 
Fight and Struggle were behind them, could not 
follow them, as they came, weary and footsore, into 
the Great Peace. 

And of those who were left behind, of those who 
stayed in the glades to gather the deadly flowers, to 
be driven ever forward by the whip of Time — what 
of them ? Surely they will learn. The kindly 
whip of Time is behind : he will never let them rest 
in such a deadly forest ; they must go ever forward ; 
and as they go they grow more and more weary, 
the glades are more and more distasteful, the heavy- 
scented blossoms more and more repulsive. They 
will find out the thorns too. At first they forgot the 
thorns in the flowers. * The blossoms are beautiful,' 
they said ; * what care we for the thorns ? Nay, the 
thorns are good. It is a pleasure to fight with 
them. What would the forest be without its thorns? 



XXIII THE FOREST OF TIME 313 

If we could gather the flowers and find no thorns, 
we should not care for them. The more the thorns, 
the more valuable the blossoms.' 

So they said, and they gathered the blossoms, 
and they faded. But the thorns did not fade ; they 
were ever there. The more blossoms a man had 
gathered, the more thorns he had to wear, and 
Time was ever behind him. They wanted to rest 
in the glades, but Time willed it ever they must go 
forward ; no going back, no rest, ever and ever on. 
So they grew very weary. 

* These flowers,' they said at last, * are always the 
same. We are tired of them ; their smell is heavy ; 
they are dead. This forest is full of thorns only. 
How shall we escape from it ? Ever as we go 
round and round we hate the flowers more, we feel 
the thorns more acutely. We must escape ! We 
are sick of Time and his whip, our feet are very, 
very weary, our eyes are dazzled and dim. We, 
too, would seek the Peace. We laughed at those 
before who went along the rocky path ; we did not 
want peace ; but now it seems to us the most 
beautiful thing in the world. Will Time never 
cease to drive us on and on ? Will these lights 
never cease to flash to and fro ? ' 

And so each man at last turns to the straight 
road. He will find out. Every man will find out 
at last that the forest is hateful, that the flowers 
are deadly, that the thorns are terrible ; every man 
will learn to fear Time. 

And then, when the longing for peace has come, 
he will go to the straight way and find it ; no man 
will remain in the forest for ever. He will learn. 



314 THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE ch.xxiii 

When he is very, very weary, when his feet are full 
of thorns, and his back scarred with the lashes of 
Time — great, kindly Time, the schoolmaster of the 
world — he will learn. 

Not till he has learnt will he desire to enter into 
the straight road. 

But in the end all men will come. 

This is a Burman allegory of Buddhism. It was 
told me long ago. I trust I have not spoilt it in 
the retelling. 



THE END 



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